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-%^ 



76 



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WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR, 

SAMOS AND SAMIAN COINS, 1862. 78. 6d. Macmillan 
& Co. 

THE TYPES OF GREEK COINS, 1883. 3l8. 6d. Cam- 
bridge University Press. 

NUMISMATIC COMMENTARY ON PAUSANIAS (with 
Dr Imhoof-Blumer), 1S87. 158. B. Quaritch. 

NEW CHAPTERS IN GREEK HISTORY, 1892. 158. 
J. Murray. 

CATALOGUE OF GREEK VASES IN THE ASH- 
MOLEAN MUSEUM, 1893. 638. Oxford Uni- 
versity Press. 

A MANUAL OF GREEK ANTIQUITIES (with Dr F. B. 
Jevons). Second Edition, 1898. 168. Griffin & Co. 

SCULPTURED TOMBS OF HELLAS, 1896. 258. Mac- 
millan & Co. 

CLASSICAL ARCHEOLOGY IN SCHOOLS (with Mr J. 
L. Myres), 1902. l8. Oxford University Press. 



FAITH AND CONDUCT, 1887. 78. 6d. Macmillan & Co. 

EXPLORATIO EVANGELICA, 1899. 158. A. & C. Black. 

A HISTORIC VIEW OF THE NEW TESTAMENT 
(Jowett Lectures for 1901). 68. A. & C. Black. 



1 



OXFORD AT THE CROSS 
ROADS 



OXFORD AT THE CROSS 



ROADS I^^J-^"^ 



of Criticism of the Course of Littera Humaniores 
in the University 



BY 



PERCY GARDNER, M.A., LiTT.D. 

LINCOLN AND MBRTON PROPBSSOR OP CLASSICAL ARCH^OLOGT, OXFORD ; 

HONORARY FELLOW OF CHRIST'S COLLBGB, CAMBRIDGE ; 

CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE ACADEMY OP SaBNCES, GOTTINGEN 



"You will not find your highest capacity in statesmanship, 
nor in practical science, nor in art, nor in any other field where 
that capacity is most urgently needed for the right service of 
life, unless there is a general and vehement spirit of search in 
the air." 

John Morlev. 



LONDON 

ADAM AND CgARLES BLACK 

190S 



PREFACE 

When a man is about to introduce to his family circle 
a friend found abroad, he can scarcely fail to look at 
his own circle in the fresh light shed by sympathy 
with the new friend's point of view ; and he may well 
discern defects which had before escaped his notice. 
Perhaps the expected arrival of Ehodes' students may 
thus aflfect some teachers at Oxford. But apart from 
the Bhodes students, there are quite sufQcient reasons 
why we should occasionally examine our ways; and 
these reasons especially apply to a place where the 
forces of conservatism, and the power of inertia, are so 
strong as they are at Oxford. 

The changes which have taken place abroad in 
university studies in the last quarter of a century are 
enormous. As is shown below, France and America 
have entirely changed their programmes. And at 
home we have a rising University of London, at present 
in nebular shape ; a new University of Birmingham ; 
there is the Welsh University; and apparently the 
Victoria University is about to divide itself. In all 
these the talk is of new schemes of work and fresh 
developments. Within the last few years Cambridge 
has recast her whole course of Classical study. All 



viii PREFACE 

this is, of course, no direct reason for changes at 
Oxford ; but it is a perfectly valid reason for making 
careful enquiry to see whether changes are needed 
there. 

There are reasons which make such an enquiry on 
my part no mere enterprise, but a matter of immediate 
and unavoidable duty. Since I was called from the 
British Museum, fifteen years ago, to take charge of the 
teaching of Classical Archaeology at Oxford, I have made 
continual efforts to secure to that branch of Humanist 
study a proper recognition by the University. Under 
present conditions these efforts have necessarily been 
in the direction of securing it a reasonable place in 
the course of Litterae Humaniores. Thrice, in 1890, 
1898, and 1900, has a committee of senior members 
of the Board of litterae Humaniores reported in 
favour of giving Classical Archseology a place in 
the final examination. Thrice has a majority of 
the Board, consisting largely of its younger members, 
rejected the report of the committee and vetoed all 
change. 

Personally at Oxford I have met nothing but friend- 
ship ; and the University has responded in a liberal 
spirit to my requests for money, so that at present all 
apparatus for study is at hand. Only in one direction 
is there set up an impassable barrier, prohibiting 
students from taking up one of the greatest and most 
important branches of humanistic study; or making 
them, if they do take it up, confine their attention to 
it within unreasonable limits. 

Now I am sure that the action of the Board does not 
proceed from dislike or mistrust of the teachers of 



PREFACE ix 

archaeology in Oxford. Nor does it proceed from 
disUke of the subject. The great majority of the 
midergraduates who have given attention to archaeology 
highly appreciate it: the tutors usually know very 
little about it, but are not hostile. But they are 
convinced that the Oxford system, being what it is, 
leaves no room whatever for the introduction of 
archaeology. It is an element ^foreign to the existing 
course of Litterae Humaniores, and its expansive force 
and energy will prevent it from taking a small place 
in that course. 

The option has thus been set before me, either to 
consent to the exclusion of Classical Archaeology, includ- 
ing even inscriptions, from the course in Humanity 
at Oxford, or to make a formal and elaborate appeal 
to the intelligence and conscience of members of 
the Board, and beyond it to all the University. After 
long consideration, I have decided on the second 
alternative. 

I would beg Oxford readers to remember that what 
I am criticizing is a system, a way of regarding things, 
not individuals. I bring no charge against my col- 
leagues, several of whom are as strongly opposed to the 
faults of the system as I am myself. On the other 
hand I am as fully alive as anyone to the fact that in 
some respects Oxford has stood in the past, and stands 
now, in a more favourable position as regards Humanist 
studies than any other university. Only I do not think 
that she can hold that position much longer, with^t 
certain changes in her course. 

In making my enquiry I shall proceed, not as an 
advocate who has a case to support, but as one who is 



X PREFACE 

interested in every side of Litterae Humaniores, in 
literature, philosophy and history, as well as archaeology, 
and as one who is thinking for the future of Oxford. 
If it be really for the good of the University that 
archaeology should be excluded from the Classical 
course, the teachers of the subject can reconcile them- 
selves to such excluBion. But it may be that this 
exclusion is a sign, not of health, but of disease, 
and if so, it is of the greatest importance to seek 
out some remedy alike for the symptom and for the 
malady. 

It will, however, be found by those who read 
further in this book that our enquiry will lead us 
far and deep. We shall have to consider what are 
the true claims of humanistic education, even what is 
the most worthy ideal of education in our universities. 
Such questions have not been much discussed at 
Oxford in late years ; we have had a time of quies- 
cence, but surely now, when the pulse of the nation 
has been quickened, and it is beginning consciously to 
move in a larger orbit, surely now is a time for looking 
backwards and forwards. 

I wish to thank my friend Mr Warde Fowler and 
my sister Miss Alice Gardner for kind help in dealing 
with proofs. 

PEECY GARDNER 



Oxford, January 1908. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I. 

PAOX 

Educational Ideals, Abroad and at Oxford ... 1 
I. Ideas governing university education in Germany, France, 

and America. 
II. Oxford education, physical, moral, and intellectual. 

CHAPTER II. 
Criticism of the Oxford Coitrse in Humanity . .19 

I. Influence of Civil Service Examinations. 
II. Criticism of the existing course in Litterse Humaniores. 

III. The course thirty years ago and now. 

IV. Exclusion of Classical Archseology. 

CHAPTER III. 

Research at Oxford 47 

I. Backwardness of Oxford as regards research. 
II. In research the process more valuable than the results. 

CHAPTER IV. 

Defence of the Classics 62 

I. Efficiency of classical study as a basis of school education. 
II. Is more advanced classical study suited to the wants of 
the age ! 



xii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER V. 

PAQB 

Hitman Science 76 

I. Intellectual and ethioal characters of human science. 
II. Advantages of contact with fact and reality. 
III. Conservatiye value of human science. 
lY. It tends to further practical efficiency. 

CHAPTER VI. 
The Classics and Hitman Science 105 

CHAPTER VII. 
Suggested Refobms 112 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Efficiency. Conclusion 126 



OXFORD AT THE CROSS 
ROADS 



CHAPTEB I 

EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABBOAD AND AT OXFORD 

To those responsible for the teaching at Oxford, the 
new foundation of Mr Ehodes causes much anxious 
thought. We may anticipate the arrival at Oxford of 
nearly two hundred endowed students from America, 
from the Colonies, from Grermany ; and when we try 
to forecast the effect their arrival will have upon the 
University, we find abundant grounds alike for hope 
and for anxiety. 

That this new element among the students will be 
absorbed by the body corporate without trouble is a 
view which can only be held by those who are un- 
aware of the vast changes which have come over the 
universities of America and of some British Colonies 
in the last twenty years, and who do not realize to 
what a degree Oxford is at present out of touch with 
university education abroad. 



2 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

That Mr Bhodes did not understand the situation 
is but natural. Though he had resided at Oxford, he 
had seen scarcely anything of the intellectual life of the 
place. Of the great mental movements of our day he 
had no knowledge. It is not for an Oxford man to 
complain of his somewhat naive confidence in his old 
university, and yet one cannot help feeling that if he 
had loved, not less well, but more wisely, he would 
have better succeeded in attaining the noble and ideal 
ends which, after all, he had at heart. Under the 
circumstances, it is most fortunate that Mr Bhodes 
left considerable powers in the hands of his trustees ; 
in some matters, however faithful they may be to the 
wishes of the testator, they will be obliged to choose 
between courting failure by carrying out his directions 
literally, and attaining his ends by somewhat different 
paths &om those which commended themselves to him. 

The interests involved are not only thpse of the 
Rhodes students and those of Oxford, but also those 
of the English-speaking race throughout the world. 
And clearly we are justified in supposing that the 
broadest interests last mentioned would in Mr Bhodes' 
mind far outweigh the narrower interests of particular 
persons. 

There are probably many residents at Oxford who 
think that Oxford's chief interest is to remain as it is 
— ^the most immobile of all great-jiniizBxsities, slowly 
affected by the great changes which have taken place, 
and are taking place, in the educated world. Some of 
my American friends, when they visit Oxford, say : 
"Change nothing; Oxford is perfectly delightful." 
But they would not dream of introduciug in their own 



EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABROAD AND AT OXFORD 3 

universities the ways which make Oxford interesting 
and picturesque; they want to retain Oxford as a 
charming place to visit, and to reserve for the uni- 
versities of America the primacy in the working 
world. Yet surely it is possible, without quite spoil- 
ing Oxford, to make the University a more efifective 
factor than it is in the world's intellectual work. 

The fact is that at present Oxford is at the 
dividing of the waya Of the two paths before us, one 
tends more and more towards narrowBess and-sta^MK- 
tion, the other towards efffifitivenftflfl and -energy. The 
question is whether the University is to become more 
and more narrow, or a great part of the working brain 
of a mighty empire, the source in the future aa in the 
past of great movements and high purposes. TVliich 
of these destinies awaits us ? In the main the decision 
rests in our own hands. 



Every scheme of education must be based upon an \ 
idea, not. a .mere . theor y, th a t i» , > b«#-ft- pi acLical"" "• 
intention. It must rest upon a view as to what is 
the purpose of life, and what are the ways in which 
that purpose is to be attained. For education is a 
preparation for life ; and as life is variously regarded, 
so will education for it vary, whether regulated by a 
State authority or merely by custom and feeling. It 
is not hard to discern the ideas which mould education 
in France and Germany, because those ideas are 
deliberately accepted by the educational authorities, 
and to be traced in their regulations. It is far less 
easy to discern the governing ideas in English or 



4 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Amerioan education, because in those countries there is 
more variety, more clashing of systems, a struggle for 
existence rather than a victorious creed and purpose. 
Tet unless we can track the underlying ideas, we 
move in the dark. 

The ultimate idea of the German university educa- 
tion is purely intellectual and scientific. To secure 
the most consummate masters of knowledge in its 
various branches, and to set these proficients to carry 
on their own studies to the utmost point, and to 
impart their results and their methods to their pupils, 
such is the business of those who govern the uni- 
versities of Germany. They are not concerned with 
the religious opinions of the students, nor primarily 
with their moral growth; such matters as those are 
for the Church or the State. Physical development 
is secured by the State military service. It is in the 
first place intellect which the universities cherish and 
foster, but intellect in close relation to fact and to 
reality. Perhaps those who are accustomed to use 
the books of Grerman university teachers may find 
this last statement scarcely to be reconciled with the 
reckless boldness in theorizing which marks their 
work. But it may be replied that a wide knowledge 
of fact requires in the man of science as a balance a 
strong theoretic bent, without which knowledge wiU 
become a mere morass. To be a thinker or a teacher 
he must be the master of his knowledge, and not let 
it become his master ; and this can only be done by 
arranging it from within in accordance with idea and 
purpose. He must draw his material from the world 
of fact, but must make it part of his own mental 



EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABROAD AND AT OXFORD $ 

furniture. A massive body of knowledge requires 
for its support a strong skeleton of theory. But that 
Germany is the land of fact and knowledge is a 
familar truth to all who attempt to pursue beyond the 
rudiments any branch of natural or human knowledge. 
Into whatever seas of fact one may sail, one is almost 
sure to find that the Grerman investigator is there 
already with his telescope and his microscope, with his 
tables of statistics and his infallible indexes. 

And the result of this pursuit of fact, this cultus 
of realities, has been beyond all denial an immense 
success, at least in >;many directions. It is this which 
has made Germany prominent in science, in applied 
knowledge, in arma As Mr Sadler well puts the 
matter : 

''In the greatest and most fruitful intellectual 
movements, the really dominant authority has always 
been not administrative in character, but intellectual 
or (in the largest sense of the word) spiritual The 
binding idea which most firmly holds together the 
intellectual labours of men engaged in the building 
up of knowledge is the conception of the unity of all 
knowledge, and the conviction that all individual 
research and labour should be subordinated to the 
claims of knowledge as a whole and of society as a 
whole. . . . The initial and underlying cause of that 
greatness (of Germany) was not the skilful contriving 
of a new form of State organization, but an intense 
and self -sacrificing enthusiasm for truth." ^ 

Mr Sadler tells us elsewhere that on the Continent 
there is now a widely-spread conviction that education, 
^ M. Sadler, Education m Oermcmy^ p. 85. 



6 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

both in the schools and the universities, has been 
regarded too exclusively as an intellectual training, 
and too little as a preparation for life. We should 
all be ready to allow that to prepare a man for life 
and conduct is a greater and a more useful thing than 
merely to instruct him. But I think that Mr Sadler's 
statement requires some interpretation. For according 
to reports which reach us from all fields of activity, 
and- from all parts of the world, the young German 
is in all matters of commercial and scientific activity 
the most efficient of men. Everywhere he is elbowing 
his way, and thrusting aside men of other nationalities, 
in Eussia, in the East, in England. Probably the 
dissatisfaction of which Mr Sadler speaks must have 
reference rather to the social outlook than to the 
efficiency of individual young Germans in daily hfe. 

In France literary feeling, a deep-rooted love of 
style, is so dominant, that it is not wonderful that 
until recently it ruled even in the universities. It is 
only in the days of the third Republic that a decided 
change set in. I cannot refrain from quoting a some- 
what long passage from an address to the students of 
the Faculty of Letters at Paris, delivered in 1897 by 
Professor Langlois, which gives a summary history of 
the course of events : ^ 

" It is not very long since we began, in the Faculty 
of Letters, to encourage and direct original research. 
Training in method and procedure in the work of 
research, in which the most flourishing of foreign 
universities find one of their chief functions, was 

^ C. y. LangloU, Questiona (ThisUrire et cPnungMmerU, 1902, p. 159. 
I have fllightly abridged in translating. 



EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABROAD AND AT OXFORD 7 

nowhere organized in France save at the "kcolQ des 
Chartes, until the creation of the i&ole des Hautes 
Etudes. From 1870 until quite recently, only these 
two institutions attempted it. That which prevented 
the Faculties from themselves organizing training in 
research was a system of examinations which they had 
not themselves instituted, and which dated from a time 
when there prevailed a view of higher education, fine 
in its way, but less comprehensive than that which has 
succeeded it. The immense majority of the students 
came to pass examinations, in which there was no place 
for training in research. How could it be expected that 
such students, however willing they might be, would 
have the heroism to undergo a painful apprenticeship, 
which would avail them nothing in the day of 
examination. The professors sometimes urged the 
students to such heroism, appealing to their higher 
feeling. Usually it was in vain. What prevails in 
the minds of candidates is naturally the shortest way 
to success. . . . You well know that now original 
research, of no account in the old examinations, is 
here rewarded and sometimes prescribed. To obtain 
the *dipl6me d'^tudes sup^rieures,' which corresponds 
to the doctorate in philosophy in German universities, 
you have to show that you understand the methods 
of research, and can use the instruments and processes 
of scientific work. Thus students — both French and 
foreign — who come here to learn to work, can receive 
the initiation they desire. . . . 

"The hopes which the changes raised have been 
justified, the fears have not." 

The French Ministry of Instruction fully accepts 



8 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the views uttered as long ago as 1882 by M. Jules 
Ferry: "Messieurs, o'est un des charact^res de la 
science de ce temps-ci, k tons les degr^s et dans tons 
les ordres, que cette soif de la recherche, que cet 
amour des documents precis, que cette passion de 
I'analyse soientifique et rigoureuse. C'est le plus beau 
titre ou la plus grande force de la science con- 
temporaine." I must here add that the University 
of Paris has now more than 13,000 students. 

The universities of America, which at first were 
ofishoots of Oxford and Cambridge, and for a while 
worked on English lines, have long ago been captured 
by German ideas. The system of options, by which a 
student is allowed to select for his university course 
any subjects he pleases, and to follow any teacher he 
may choose, is, according to President Eliot of Harvard, 
an essential feature of American university education ; 
and this system firmly fixes it on German lines. It 
is true that in America there are many more cross 
currents than in Germany; and an almost infinite 
number of conflicting ideals struggle for the mastery 
in universities as elsewhere. But in all the larger and 
more important of them, the scientific spirit is the 
dominant one, the pursuit of knowledge is the 
main end, to which all else is subordinate. And 
almost all th« distinguished university teachers of 
America have studied in Germany, and brought 
thence purposes and convictions which can scarcely 
be altered, whereas but one here and there even 
knows the methods and arrangements of the English 
universities. In particular there has arisen with 
rapid growth and spread a custom of devoting some 



EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABROAD AND AT OXFORD 9 

years after the Bachelor's degree to the special study 
of some branch of knowledge : and now the man who 
has not taken one of these graduate courses has but 
small chance of election to a professorship, or to any 
position of importance in the scholastic world. The 
natural result is that the last twenty years, which have 
seen an enormous growth and spread of universities 
in America, have also seen an immense rise in their 
standard of knowledge and scientific attainment. 

II. 

When we turn from the universities of the Continent 
and of America to our own older universities, and 
particularly Oxford, we pass into quite a different 
climate. The intellectual idea, the intense respect for 
fact as iaQt^A has never been dominant here. At first 
sight to an impartial observer this might seem strange, 
since it cannot be questioned that the English nature 
is in almost all fields deeply impressed by the value of 
fact and reality. And the virtue of personal truthful- 
ness is more highly regarded in England than in most 
countries. But the universities have, for historic [ 
reasons, into which it is impossible here to enter at 
length, become closely connected with the public .^ 
schools, and are dominated by the spirit of the public 
schools. In Germany and America, public schools" 
like ours do not exist; and when boys leave the 
gymnasia and high schools for the university, they pass . 
into an atmosphere quite different, from a state of 
pupilage to a complete intellectual liberty. In i 
England the break between school and university is 
by no means so marked. The college tutor takes on 



lo OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the pupil of the public school master, and his education 
is continued on nearly the same lines on which it had 
moved before. The youth is supposed to be trained 
at our older universities not only in literary taste, 
alertness of mind, power of expression, but also in 
^manliness and gentlemanliness, as these qualities are 
inderstood in the English public school. But, unfor- 
oitely, the spirit of the public schools is obstinately 
set against intellect. 

In a striking paper, published in the December 
number of the Nineteenth Century, Sir Oliver Lodge 
has called attention to the fact, admitted on all hands, 
that our public school system, with all its merits, has 
very great drawbacks, because in a time when in- 
telligence is urgently demanded "the intellectual 
standard maintained at English public schools is low 
.... a good many young boys have a germ of 
intellectual life in them, but in many cases it dies a 
natural death from mere inanition .... intellectual 
things are, to put it frankly, unfashionable."^ The 
same want of intellectual interest is carried by boys 
from the public schools to the universities. From 
a considerable experience of Oxford freshmen, I can 
assert that it is exceedingly difficult to stir the minds 
which have been thus made numb to all intellectual 
interests. Men who come to Oxford from Scotch or 
Welsh colleges, or from schools abroad, are usually 
easier by far to interest in matters of history and 
archaeology than those who come from our great 
schools, excepting one or two. 

^ These words are not Prinoipal Lodge's, but quoted from Mr A. G. 
Benson's Schoolmaster. 



EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABROAD AND AT OXFORD ii 

Now if the unfashioimbleness of intelligence is a 
danger in public schoola, it is certainly a far greater 
danger in" tLe ' universities. This is clear in spite of 
the fact, to which there is abundant testimony from 
many quarters, that the best authorities on education 
on the Continent are now inclining to the opinion that 
in most countries the training of young men has been 
too closely limited to the intellectual aspect, that 
education should be a process of physical, moral, and 
intellectual discipline, and not merely a training for 
the mind. Attempts are being made in America to 
introduce something like the English public school. 
English games are being to some extent cultivated in 
French and Grerman high schools. But while, as 
Englishmen, we recognize this fact with complacency, 
it is no reason why we should abstain, at this great 
crisis of the national life, from a eareful examination 
of our position and our ideals. It may be, and, indeed, 
one may venture to say it certainly is, the truth that 
whereas Germany has gone too far in one direction in 
education, we have goile too far in the other. Each 
nation has something to learn from the other, and the 
best course, as usual, lies between the two extremes. 

Naturally the intellectual side of university educa- 
tion — the side which can be studied in the Calendar 
and lecture-list — is the only side which I can criticize 
in detail All else is matter of custoni and convention, 
which can change but slowly with changing feeling. But 
it may be well, before passing on to the consideration 
of the teaching and examinations of Oxford, to say a 
few words as to the physical and moral training which 
the undergraduates receive. 



12 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

In the modem world there are three modes of 
phTsical culture, which prevail in various countries. 
First there is^ militarjr service, imposed on the 
Continent on all young, men, and combined with 
exercises which in a great degree set up for life 
those who go through it It is to such military 
training that the great nations of Europe trust, to 
avert that constantly-hovering danger, the physical 
degeneration of the people. In England, voluntary 
games and sports take the place of this training. In 
some of the American universities a system of physical 
culture is usual, and even compulsory. A regular 
trainer inspects all students, and prescribes to them 
certain exercises by which their physical development 
may be promoted and their health established. 

Each of these systems has its advantages and its 
disadvantages. The military system has the enormous 
advantage of being compulsory on all, and being 
bound up not with mere pleasure or esprit de corps, 
but with national duty. It tends to give men a 
serious view of their relation to the State; and it 
certainly is admirably effective in developing the body 
towards efficiency and health. On the other hand it 
lasts, in Grermany in the case of university students, 
only a year, which is not long enough to solidly 
establish a healthy physique. 

Physical culture, if conducted by skilful experts, is 
of almost unlimited efficiency. What can be done in 
this way has been shown among us recently by the 
Japanese wrestlers. The great drawback is that this 
system substitutes for the exhilaration of sport the 
dull routine of hours of exercise. And it has no 



EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABROAD AND AT OXFORD 13 

moral outlook; it begins and ends with physical 
development. That it has a great future no observer 
of the signs of the times can doubt. But one need 
be in no hurry to further a chill, self-regarding and 
uninteresting routine. 

As to our English games it is not easy to speak 
satisfactorily in brief space. In joyousness this mode 
of physical culture stands first. It develops the body 
through pleasure instead of through pain ; or if there 
be pain, it is self-imposed and lightly borne. It 
strongly encourages some high moral qualities, the 
custom of obedience and of command, esprit de corps, 
love of fairplay and generosity. It develops finer 
qualities of hand and eye than any mechanical train- 
ing. And the element of competition in it may fairly 
be regarded as a good training for a world in which 
competition is the rule. 

But proud as every Englishman must be of our 
English sports, one cannot overlook the fact that the 
system is on its trial, and shows signs of decay. The 
element of competition may be good, but carried to 
excess it is ruinous. When men who cannot play 
well prefer to look on at a match rather than them- 
selves to play indifferently, the decay of games sets in. 
When a man has to devote all his time and energy 
before he can hope to excel in a sport, the game 
clearly is not worth the candle. And high medical 
authorities declare that athletes who go through too 
severe tests are seldom or never in middle life so 
sound as they would have been had they taken 
only moderate exercise. I hold it to be beyond 
question that athletics at the universities make 



14 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

too great demands on the time and energies of 
undergraduates; they are too costly and too highly 
specialized. 

Thus the system of games, unlike the other systems 
of physical training which I have mentioned, tends by 
over-developnent to destroy itself. It is mere matter 
of history that by over-development it did destroy 
itself in Greece.^ And it is a safe prophecy that 
unless there is among us a reaction towards sobriety 
and moderation, it will before long destroy itself in 
England. It is the many, rather than the few, whose 
physique requires watching and correction ; and unless 
the many continue to cultivate games, the extreme 
efl&ciency of the few will not prevent those games 
from failing altogether in good purpose. To watch 
cricket and football is a form not of exercise but of 
idleness ; and exercise is more necessary to weak and 
indolent than to strong and active men. 

Let us next briefly consider the ethical side of 
Oxford training. This, however, is no easy thing to 
do, and a thing which can scarcely be done in brief 
compass. If we turn to the writings of those whom 
we may call the great Oxford reformers of the last 
generation, in regard to whom I fear none of us could 
utter the boast of Diomedes,* men such as Matthew 
Arnold and Goldwin Smith, we shall find that they 
vindicate the moral training of Oxford in their day as 
at all events in some respects decidedly effective. 

Matthew Arnold pointed out that at Oxford the 

^ On this subject I would venture to refer to my New Ohajpters in 
Oreek History, pp. 300-304. 
a '< Than tiiese our fathers better far we make our boast to be." 



EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABROAD AND AT OXFORD 15 

upper classes developed fine and governing qualities,^ X 
" a high spirit, dignity, a just sense of the greatness of 
great affairs." This he sets in some degree against the 
contempt for science which he attributed to the same 
class. Professor Henry Nettleship wrote, in a volume 
of essays on Eesearch, twenty-five years ago, " We do 
not produce, and do not wish to produce, scholars, but 
educated men, furnished with so much of liberal 
culture as will enable them to win and to maintain 
their position in life and in society, or to succeed 
better in any practical pursuit in which they may 
engage/' I may add a little bit of testimony to the 
same eflfect which I myself met with twenty-five years , 
ago. Coming then into contact with the teachers 
employed by a great firm in London who prepared 
men from the universities and elsewhere for public 
examinations, I found them to be unanimously of 
opinion that of all the pupils who came to them, those 
from Oxford had the highest practical efficiency and 
best knew how to make the most of themselves. 

This end, beyond doubt, is one well worth striving 
after, and some justification of the Oxford course in 
past days. But it is very doubtful whether assertions 
as to the practical efficiency of Oxford training are as 
true now as they were thirty years ago. Indeed, it 
may be gravely doubted whether the Oxford training 
has not in some degree lost its quality of efiective- 
ness, without acquiring a scientific character. How- 
ever this be, the conditions in the world have so 
completely changed during one generation, that a 
training which had efficiency thirty years ago would 
^ Higher Schools omd UhwersUies in Cfermawy, p. 207. 



i6 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

have far smaller efficiency now. Self-confidence, 
without knowledge at its back, does not go so far as 
it did in the world. The value of method, of organiza- 
tion — in a word, of science — is every year becoming 
greater. The man who knows can in our day always 
in the long run beat the inan who thinks that he 
knows but does not, and the man who thinks that it 
does not matter whether he knows or not. In the 
competition of nations, ordered knowledge and reasoned 
action directed to definite ends go for more and more, 
energy and self-confidence for less and less. They are 
the bow and arrow in the hands of a giant pitted 
against the repeating rifle in the hands of drilled 
soldiers. 

Of course real character, high morale, will still tell 
in the long run. But, as I shall try to show later, 
there is no real discrepancy between scientific study 
and high character; rather character will make men 
impatient of all study which is not systematic. And 
certain virtues — patience, self-suppression, persever- 
ance — ^are certainly promoted by any scientific study. 
But many virtues are not either promoted or dis- 
couraged by methodic study; they must be acquired 
by other means. Idleness, at all events, is the worst 
foe of all manly virtues, and most ruinous in the 
work of life. 

A remarkable feature which Oxford and Cambridge 
have, and Continental universities have not, is the 
collfige system. On the moral aspects of college life 
there is no need to discourse, since there is no question 
of destroying that Ufe. Continental and American 
\authorities are disposed to envy us our colleges. To 



EDUCATIONAL IDEAS, ABROAD AND AT OXFORD 17 

Cecil Khodes> in some respects a keen judge, the 
college seemed the most important feature of the 
un i voK i ity . No one can have read the biographiear 
recently published of prominent Englishmen without 
seeing how much college friendships, college dis- 
cussions, college associations, still add to the beauty 
and the dignity of life in those who have been trained in 
colleges. Whatever changes may hereafter be found 
necessary in Oxford curricula, those changes will 
probably not alter the main relations of college 
existence. It is true that, as all good things may be 
overdone, an excess of collegiate feeling or too great 
control by college tutors may tend to mar the freedom 
and breadth of university education. But it will be 
best to pass on at once to speak of education at 
the University in its more official and intellectual 
form. 

Instead of embodying, like the Grerinan universities, ^ 
a single simple idea — that of science — Oxford tries 
to realize many in turn or all at once. Educatioaj&JL. 
preparation for life: but the lives livfid. by. .educatfidL: 
Englishmen are very various, and the j^jreparatioa 
should also be various. But the question remains, 
and often presents itself — has tho. variety of purppaes-- 
and aims in Oxford education any real relation to.tlia.— 
facts of the present day, or is it rather true that it is 
adapted to the circumstances of long ago ? Oxford is 
before >Al Uhings conserv ative. And conservatism is a 
great power in life ; but it may sometimes go too far. 
A healthy conservatism which prefers to let others try 
the necessary experiments, and only accepts established 
results, may be wise. But a conservatism based on 

2 



V 



i8 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

self-confidence or indolence is always dangerous, and 
in such times as ours may well be fatal. 
/' I have headed this discussion "Oxford at^ the 
i Cross Eoads/' and have suggested that the coming of 
the Bhodes students is a crisis in the history of the 
University. But it is not only the coming of these 
students which makes the crisis; without them the 
crisis would be sufficiently marked. From all the 
leaders of our national life, from statesmen like Lord 
Eosebery and Mr Chamberlain, from our leaders in 
education, our captains of industry, our military and 
naval critics, one hears a general chorus that England 
in the competition of nations is falling behind, that 
we are too lethargic, that our rivals are moving faster 
than we are, that we shall lose our place among the 
nations unless we bestir ourselves and alter our ways. 
The cry for greater efficiency, for a better adaptation 
to modern conditions, for a careful reconsideration of 
our position, is so general and so strong, that no man 
in a public and responsible position has a right to be 
deaf to it. Even if it is our strength to sit still, we 
must be able to give a reason for sitting still when all 
the world is on the mOve. 



I- 



CHAPTEE II 

CRIHOISM OF THE OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 

There can scarcely be any question that at Oxford 
it is the humanistic side of education jvyhxcJbL.giKes 
the tone to the whole 'University. In Litterse 
Humaniores the most characteristic and most in- 
fluential of Oxford teachers have their scope; in 
litterae Humaniores the ablest of the students take 
their degrees. Those who speak of Oxford education 
always think first of the humanist side of it. This is 
a great distinction and privilege to the University, 
and it lays upon us a deeper obligation to be sure 
that we who lay greater stress on the humanities than 
any other university in the English-speaking world, 
perhaps in the whole world, shall proceed with 
wisdom and with full appreciation of the needs of the 
time. 

I shall venture to deal only with this one side of 
Oxford education, the classical or humanistic side. 
That the physical and biological sciences are far less 
cultivated and esteemed among us than they should 
be, I have no doubt. But some progress has been 

«9 



20 



OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 



made in the equipment of our schools of natural 
science in recent years, and to the many able and 
energetic Oxford professors in the subject must be 
left the task of urging its claims on the University, 
and on the country. It is a well-worn theme on 
which they will have to dwell; and there wiU be 
many sympathizers. But when one urges the claims 
of the other half of science — the human — one opens 
new ground, and one runs great risk of misapprehension. 



It is with regret that I criticize the scheme of work 
in litterae Humaniores, and the examination in which 
the course ends. Friends and colleagues at Oxford 
have often expressed to me their conviction, based on 
a long experience, that the system tends greatly to 
the development of intelligence and mental growth 
among students, and I am unable to do anything 
but accept their testimony. I have seen my own 
pupils, in passing through the course, become more 
articulate, more alert, better able to deal with books 
and thought. It may be that on the whole it would 
not be easy to suggest any course of mental discipline 
which would in the time do more to cultivate in 
certain ways the ordinary intelligent young English- 
man. The mingling of historic criticism and philo- 
sophic thought which it implies is generally allowed to 
be a very fruitful mixture. But I think it possible, 
as I shall show later, to check the evils of the present 
course without destroying it, or losing the advan- 
tages which belong to it. The great defects which 
demand alteration at all hazards are its too r^d and 



\ 



V 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 21 

excluEdve character, and, above all, its too marked 
domination. 

Let us suppose that the present course in LitteraB 
Humaniores is not merely good for many of the stu- 
dents, but as good as any such course wMch could be 
devised for the majority of them. Even in that case, 
the setting up of a fixed and hard system, the in- 
clusion of some subjects and exclusion of others, the 
persistent attempt to drill the minds of undergraduates 
according to a tradition, are so pernicious to the 
character of the University, that there is utmost 
need of change. If the course seems good for indi- 
'viduals, it is ruinous to the commonwealth. The 
University needs the greatest possible variety, in 
subjects of study, in intellectual habits and tendencies, 
in outlook on the world. By being hemmed in and 
limited, it gives up an important part of its service to 
the country. 

This limitation of studies is produced and perpetuated 
by the hard and fast examination system which binds 
us hand and foot. (Nowhere, not even at Cambridge, 
does there exist any so fixed a scheme of study 
as is furnished by the Oxford course of litters 
Humaniores.^ In the Final Schools, though necessity 
has forced on the examiners some relaxation in tiiie 
matter of aUgwing alternatives, yet none are officially 1 
announced. |Oxford has decided that in the study of the \ 
Humanities one course is better than all othei^and \ 
that every student shall be driven through this par- \ 
ticular gate. The Final Schools are one fluke of the 
anchor which prevents Oxford from moving with the ' 
stream, and the other fluke is the Civil Service Ex- 



22 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS^ 

aminatioD, which resembles the Final Schools almost as 
one side of an anchor resembles the other. 

I propose to speak in turn of the Civil Service Ex- 
amination and of the Oxford Final Schools, and it may 
be well to begin with the Civil Service Examinations, 
since in criticizing them I am sure to find sympathetic 
readers. 

A large and increasing number of undergraduates 
make the attainment of a good place in this examina- 
tion the object of their academic career. In the 
crowded state of the professions they find here the 
only visible chance of a safe and respectable career. 
The result of tying together the University and the 
Civil Service Examinations is naturally that neither 
can move independently of the other. Practically it 
appears that neither can move at all. We are stereo- 
typed, incapable of moving in a moving world, like 
Ixion, constantly revolving but making no progress. 
It is necessary to speak strongly in this matter. Even 
conservative Oxford tutors are often heard to speak 
dolefully of the way in which the limits of the Civil 
Service Examinations bound their lectures and narrow 
their pupils. As soon as a lecturer leaves the charmed 
circle of the immediately paying^ he often sees his 
pupils fall away. Any subject which has not a 
satisfactory place in the great competition is dropped 
and neglected. 

Now examinations in their place are good enough. 
In England under existing circumstances they are, if 
an evil, a necessary evil. Every teacher knows that 
without examinations in prospect he would never be 
able to keep the attention of undergraduates fixed on 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 23 

their work. But examinations, if useful servants, are 
bad masters. And when they are not merely masters, 
but tyrants without appeal, the university course be- 
comes a mere slavery. At present the Oxford course 
is full of them ; in the College and in the University 
they are always in the way, to prevent free study. 

It will be within the memory of many Oxford 
teachers how the present system of CivU Service 
Examinations came into being fifteen years ago. The 
age of competition was then raised, and the curriculum 
modified, in order that it might better fit in with the 
Final Examinations of Oxford and Cambridge. A 
petition in favour of the changes was largely signed in 
the universities ; I am glad to think that I was among 
the few who refused to sign. Disastrous indeed have 
been the consequences to us. Whether they have been 
equally unfortunate to the Indian Service I know not. 
But I know that many good judges in India greatly 
regret the raising of the age of competition, involving 
as it does the reduction of the two years of special 
training after the examination to one year, which is 
quite insufficient for acquiring the broad knowledge of 
things Indian, very desirable before a man is suddenly 
plunged into their practical details. 

A very able and experienced Indian official, Mr 
Vincent Smith, writes to me: "The law course is 
now confined to the Indian codes, and an elementary 
knowledge of one language satisfies the examiners. 
The essential subjects of Indian history and geography 
have been relegated to the voluntary division.^ Politi- 

"^ By a Toc«nt regulation, Indian history is again made compulsory. 
But the men have no time to give to it. 



24 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

cal economy, likewise, a knowlecj^e of which is of the 
highest importance to an Indian administrator, is no 
longer a compulsory subject. The result of the 
excessive abbreviation of the training is that the 
selected candidates now go out to India with the 
slightest possible knowledge of either law or Oriental 
subjects. I am strongly of opinion that the period 
of two years formerly prescribed for the training of the 
selected candidates was not too long. The work of 
Oriental administration is pecxdiar, and requires special 
preparation, for which two years are a moderate 
allowance." 

As the age at which young officials go out to India 
cannot be raised, it seems that either they must be 
sent out in an unprepared condition, or else the age 
of competition must be once more lowered. 

I cannot more fully go into the question whether 
by the present scheme India secures a satisfactory 
governmental staff. But from the point of view of 
the universities and of higher education ^generally, that 
scheme is a disaster. We have all seen men whose 
talents should have enabled them to advance the 
boundaries of knowledge, men bom for the life of a 
scholar or man of science, devoting their exceptional 
talents merely to capturing a foremost place in the 
Civil Service list. It is hard sometimes to blame 
them. Family funds are perhi^s at a low ebb, and 
will not bear the strain caused by the long and painful 
start in a professional career. But though the de- 
clension from the scholarly ideal may be comprehen-^ 
sible, it is an evil sign. It looks as if the old English 
restlessness and ambition were dying down, when our 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 25 

brightest youths limit their aspirations to the hope of 
attaining a gentlemanly employment and a retiring 
pension in the home service. India is, of course, 
different, and may fairly claim of our best : but it is 
not men of preponderant intellect that India requires ; 
rather men of tact and principle; and it is very 
doubtful whether such are secured by our present 
system. In a sense a loosening of the connexion with 
the Civil Service scheme would be a loss to the 
University, but freedom is worth purahasing at a 
great price. 

11. 

It is to be feared that some readers who sympathize 
with hostile criticism of the tendencies of the Civil 
Service Examination will be quite indisposed to go 
with me when I pass to criticism of the Oxford 
examinations themselves. But the course I take is 
one which I cannot avoid. 

What then is the standard which we have set before 
the abler undergraduates who have been working in our 
classical schools ? ^ The aim has been to make them 
jiultured. First, they have been set to attain a fairly 
accurate knowledge of the Greek and Latin languages, 
then an appreciation of classical litej:a{;ure, next a 
knowledge of parts of ancient philosophy, and of 
ancient history mainly on its political side. They are 
also expected to show considerable knowledge of 
modem logic and philosophy, and to be able to write 

^ I must apologize to Oxford readers for stating many things whioh 
are matters of common knowledge among us, but I do not wish to 
adapt this paper only to those weU acquainted with Oxford studiei. 



26 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

eflfectively at short notice on almost any subject which ;. 
is not of a technical character. 

The first part of the course, occupying nearly two 
years, is the preparation for Moderations, I think it 
is generally felt that this is a weak part of our system. 
Tor in Moderations the examination has to do not 
merely with work Uke that done in school, but largely 
with work which has actually been done at schpol. 
When a man who has been well trained in the classics 
at school comes to Oxford, he finds that for two yearsi 
he has little more to do than to go over again the 
authors whom he has already read. He may, if he , 
pleases, take up, as alternative subjects, some studies 
which will be new to him, logic, comparative philology,^ ; 
the history of Greek sculpture. These new pursuits! . 
will probably be the most interesting part of his work.; 
I know from the testimony of a large number of under- \ 
graduates that at all events the study of Greek \ 
sculpture appears to them a very great relief from \ 
their other work. But these alternative subjects are i 
not allowed to take any large part of the time or 
attention of the student. 

Yet the moment when a youth passes from school 
to university is surely of all the moments of life the 
one which should be seized on to give him wider 
views and fresh intellectual interest& His appetite 
should be fresh, and if fresh intellectual nutriment is 
not given him, it is exceedingly likely that he will 
give the best of his energy and love to other matters, 

1 This is the only provision for comparative philology in the course. 
I have never heard the subject spoken of at the Board of Studies save 
as an unsatisfactory subject for Moderations. 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 27 

such as athletic sports or social amusements. And 
this^ too often, is what actually takes place. 

As the preparation for the Final Schools occupies 
rather more than two years, we may suppose that 
one year is taken up with philosophy, and one with 
ancient history. By philosophy is meant Plato and 
Aristotle in the first place, and in the second place 
logic and moral philosophy, political science, and the 
works of ancient and modem philosophers. Granting 
that to the ordinary clever man a training in Greek 
philosophy is an excellent mental gymnastic, yet it 
is a very doubtful procedure to regard modem 
philosophy as a sort of appendix to that of the Greeks. 
For psychology in all its ramifications, psychology- 
observational and experimental, the course leaves 
little time, and to regard ancient philosophy as summed 
up in Plato and Aristotle is a very unsatisfactory view. 
The later schools — ^the Stoics, Epicureans, and Academics 
— are in some ways as nearly related to modern thought 
as are the great Attic masters. In particular, the 
exclusive or almost exclusive study of the latter tends 
greatly to conceal from the student that the history 
of philosophic thought in antiquity is continuous, from 
Plato to Origen. 

If the course in litterae Humaniores were al- 
together classical, and if there were in Oxford a 
separate school of ancient and modem philosophy, 
then no doubt there would be some justification for 
making the study of Plato and Aristotle as prominent 
as it is in the Final Schools. But modem philosophy, 
and especially modem logic and psychology, will 
refuse to be thmst into a comer. These studies will 



28 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

naturally attract many of the ablest of the under- 
graduates, whose fate will painf ally resemble that of \ 
Tantalus. Historically the great importance assigned ^^ 
to Aristotle at Oxford is a remnant of the vast 
dominion which he exercised in the Middle Ages. 
And admirable as are the intellect and the method 
of the Master, it is unjustifiable to compel all students 
in Humanity alike to give as much time as they do 
to the study of him. 

In Greek and Boman history the texts are primary, 
Herodotus, Thucydides, Tacitus and the rest ; and 
with the texts goes a mass of commentary, results of 
investigation, data from inscriptions and the like, 
which the students acquire, not from the works of 
the masters who have collected the facts, but from 
Jecturers, who (I am told) commonly make a skilful 
mosaic from various sources and adapt it to the 
note-book of_the undergraduate. There is certainly 
no time to check the statements of the lecturers, to 
turn to the sources whence they borrow, to compare 
author with author and inscription with inscription. 
The pace allows no pause for realization, investigation, 
contact with fact and tracing out of sources. 

As a mental training history thus taught seems to^ 
me inferior to the study of Plato and Aristotle, Butler 
and Kant. For it is not easy to distinguish between 
philosophers and philosophy. But between historians 
and history the distinction ie^ deep enough. The most 
valuable training which the study of history should . 
give to the mind is the power of judging ^videjice, the 
comparison of authorities, the sifting of facts, and the : 
realization of the past life of the world. And this* 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 29 

training it is impossible that a course so humed and 
incomplete as that of Oxford can give. Such a course 
may enable men to follow the outlines of ancient 
military social and political life, and to write essays 
in regard to it, but it is certainly no adequate training 
in historic method. 

And the want of time tells also in another way. 
As it is quite impossible to untangle the whole skein 
of Greek and Boman life, some threads or some parts 
of it are singled out, and the rest treated almost as 
n(m-existent. Certain periods of Greek and Boman 
history are studied to the exclusion of others. In a 
fellowship examination, one of the candidates informed 
me that Bhodes ceased to have a history after B.c. 400 ; 
the fourth century is, in fact, but little studied ; and a 
knowledge of the development of European civilization 
between the rise of Greece and the fall of Bome exists 
in the students' minds as a series of oases in the 
desert. As one leading tjiread of history must be 
selected, that one thread naturally is the constitutional. 
This is, however, done in a way which is unfortunately 
exclusive. 

Beligion, art, manners, for instance, are set aside. 
We may compare the view of Greek history encouraged 
in Oxford with the wider and more comprehensive view 
of Matthew Arnold.^ " By knowing ancient Greece I 
understand knowing her as the giver of Greek art, 
and a guide to a free and right use of reason, and to 
scientific method, and the founder of our mathematics 
and physics and astronomy and biology." 

It is true that if we refer to the papers in ancient 
^ XdteraUbre and ScUnce, p. 9L 



30 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

hifltory set in the schools in past years, we may some- 
times light on such questions as: ''What light is 
thrown on ancient history by the study of numis- 
matics?'* or, "Can any conclusions as to the early 
populations of the Aegean be drawn from recent dis- 
coveries ? " But such questions are little better than 
a mockery.' They occur in a perfectly haphazard 
way : no undergraduate can be sure of having a single 
question in any particular part of ancient history 
which he may have studied, if away from the ordinary 
lines. And as only a few questions out of many are 
answered by the examinees, a man who by accident 
has a chance to show unusual knowledge in some 
direction does so at considerable risk. 

Probably in the Oxford teaching of ancient history 
there is no blank so great as the absence of all 
methodical arrangement for bringing before students 
those inscriptions which are first-hand contemporary 
documents, some acquaintance with which is a 
necessity to any one who wants to study ancient 
history to any purpose. Occasional courses of lectures 
on Boman inscriptions are given at Christ Church to 
a small class. There are in the University absolutely 
no lectures on Greek inscriptions regarded as a source 
of history and a test of the statements of historians. Of 
two hundred or more men who annually take honours 
in ancient history, perhaps not one will know how to 
restore or utilize an inscription. In fact the students 
have no time for lectures on, or for any private study of, 
inscriptions. This fact in itself is enough to prove the 
present course in litterse Humaniores quite unsuited 
to the canons of historic study as now accepted. 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 31 

Of course almost anything can be taken as a special 
subject in the iBnal examination. But by taking a 
special subject the student escapes no part of the set 
or regular subjects ; and as these entirely absorb his 
time, how is it possible to take up any matter outside 
them to any advantage? Nothing will really widen 
the course except the allowing of alternatives. 

It may thus be said with truth that whereas there 
are certain fields in ancient history with which almost 
every man who passes through the schools becomes 
acquainted, other fields, as numerous and quite as 
important, are explored by none, a state of things 
which seems to me altogether discreditable to the 
University, and extremely misleading. The contact of 
mind with mind under such circumstances produces 
not broader knowledge, but rather prejudice. 

In this case, again, there would be less cause for 
complaint if in another school ancient history were 
taken up in a more serious way, studied on all its 
sides and in relation to its sources. A knowledge of 
ancient history formed mainly from lectures may, 
when combined with other kinds of knowledge, be a 
fairly satisfactory education for men taken one by one. 
But when this is the sum of the ancient history 
taught or recognized by the University, when research 
is branded as specialism or despised as valueless, 
then one is obliged to allow that our most classical 
University does not, after all, do justice to the study 
of Greek and Boman civilization as that study is 
now received in the greater world. To this subject 
I will return in my sixth chapter. 

Further, it is clear tl\at scholarship proper, easy 



32 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

mastery of the Greek and Latin languages, and 
familiarity with classical literature as literature, must 
be almost crowded out of the Final Schools. To men 
who intend to teach Classics in schools, good and 
accurate scholarship is exceedingly important. It is 
certain that a first in the schools does not guarantee 
good scholarship ; and on the other hand good scholar- 
ship does not by itself secure a first-class. Probably 
in past days the English universities have somewhat 
overrated elegant scholarship ; Cambridge has certainly 
cultivated it much too exclusively ; yet in its place it 
is a thing well worth guarding and encouraging. It 
goes naturally with good style in English letters. At 
Oxford at present it does not by any means have a 
fair chance, and I have heard in most competent 
quarters complaints of the decay of Oxford scholar- 
ship. 

The writing of frequent essays upon a great variety 
of subjects is a training which has some merits, but 
those merits are balanced by so much which is objec- 
tionable that it seems very desirable to try to secure 
the good of the system without the evil. It is a good 
thing to be able to express oneself clearly, and to have 
the pen of a ready writer. If men were set to write 
out clearly what they had really learned, it would be 
an excellent training. But I think that to set men 
to write on subjects about which they know little, and 
about which under the conditions they can learn but 
little, is not merely inexpedient but radically immoral. 
It trains the writer to conceal his ignorance, to pretend 
to know what he does not know, to cultivate sophistries 
of aU kinds. And worst of all, a man who has once 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 33 

learned the fatal art of writing plausibly, without 
knowledge, will scarcely in after life be persuaded 
to take the pains necessary in order to discover 
the truth of things. Perhaps these phrases may 
seem strained: but I am convinced that while the 
writing of essays may furnish useful exercise for the 
student, it is a practice full of danger unless controlled 
with much discretion. 

It would not be easy to ascertain what proportion 
mere show-essay writing bears in Oxford to real essay 
writing. Much depends upon the training and 
tendencies of particular tutors. But the merely 
rhetorical spirit which used to be dominant in Oxford'^y 
essays is certainly by no means extinct. Than this 
spirit, nothing could be more destructive to the tone 
of a university, or more out of harmony with the 
conditions of modem life. 

Any criticism of the Oxford course in the Humani- 
ties cannot avoid speaking briefly of the tutorial 
system, which is one of its most dearly-marked 
features. It is notorious that at Oxford a student \ 
receives closer and rnnrft pf}rflftnnl^tt^^;^?]!l^!iaTi Q^^^^^g^- ; 
agywhere. He spends time every week with his * 
tutor, is told what lectures he should attend, what 
books he should read, and he reads essays which he 
has written on given subjects. I cannot speak with 
much confidence in regard to this training, of which I 
have little personal experience. It would seem to 
have both good and bad sides. It may be allowed 
that close personal intercourse between a more mature 
and a more immature mind is in many ways beneficial 
to the younger man. But it is to be feared that per- 

3 



34 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Bonal guidance, carried to the length to which it is 
now commonly carried, is fatal to the independence 
and originative power of the pupil. 

The effect, however, upon the tutor is decidedly 
detrimental Tlie man who gives all his days in 
personal attention to pupils has no leisure for w ork of _ 
researeh himself^ has no time and no opportunity for 
more broadly considering the tendencies of studj^** 

And in the vacation he is apt to be^ occupied with ^ 

examinations or else too weary to think of anything 
beyond restoring his expended forces and preparing 
for the next term's lectures. If there is one thing 
certain as regards university education, it is that he 
who would teach freshly and effectively must carry on 
advanced studies of his own in the subject on which he 
lectures. And without leisure and stimulating reading 
a teacher entirely loses his enthusiasm and force. v^ 

It is clear that by better organization the lecturing \^ 
work of the University might be diminished. For j 
example, it is surely unnecessary that eight lecturers ' \ 
should lecture in the same term on the Ethics of ^ I 
Aristotle. But I must not take up the question of I 
organization, which is a pressing one. That under / 
present circumstances a fair proportion of tutors find / 
time, in spite of all drawbacks, to produce learned / 
work, some of it of a high class, is immensely to their 
credit. But the fact remains that time and energy 
are limited; and what of these is given for one 
purpose cannot be retained for another. Overstrain 
and exhaustion, sometimes nervous and sometimes 
intellectual, must needs be a common result of at- 
tempting that which is scarcely possible. 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 35 

There is probably nowhere a more able, conscientious, 
and devoted set of teachers than are the Oxford 
tutors. But their horizon is usually limited. Those 
who pass from a public school to the university, and 
are set to teach directly after their degree, have no 
chance of coming into contact with a wider world. 
Devotion to Oxford traditions is apt with them to 
become a superstition, and their very conscientiousness 
keeps them bound to the routine under which they 
have grown up. Their conservatism has become a 
clog which stops all the wheels of progress. If the 
new Ehodes students really bring in a fresher wind 
into our somewhat stale class-rooms, they will indeed 
be a blessing. 

III. 

There can be little doubt that thirty or forty years 
ago the training in Litterse Humaniores was more 
self-consistent and more effective than it is at present. 
It had an ethical and rhetorical character, and stood 
apart from the growth of historic science. In its way, 
in those days it was a masterpiece. But even then 
it did not suit everyone, and in particular it was 
harshly judged by those scholars who already felt the 
changes in the intellectual horizon. For example, 
0. H. Pearson, the author of National Life and 
Character, thus states his impression of it: — 

" The worst result of the Oxford teaching was not 
so much even its flagrant inadequacy as that it had 
a superficial f^nnilllrtirP.Cn.rL-frnm tho nirill with whinh 
clever 'men, constantly grinding at it^.had reduoed it 
into form. To have left Oxford hungering for real 



36 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

knowledge would have been beneficial ; to leave it — 
as most of us did — thoroughly self-complacent and 
believing that the University had taught us very 
nearly the last word in philosophy, was unmixedly 
mischievous." ^ 

Probably Mr Pearson profited by his Oxford training 
in ways of which he was scarcely aware. And he 
would perhaps have allowed that to men destined for 
certain callings in life it was decidedly helpful In 
the future barrister it promoted the power of seeing 
rapidly the strong and the weak sides of a case. In 
the future journalist it produced a faculty for writing 
skilfully on a given subject at short notice. It certainly 
tended to make men articulate, of well-balanced minds, 
intellectually athletic. But Pearson disliked the form 
of knowledge when devoid of the substance of it, and 
thought about the false conceit of knowledge somewhat 
as did Socrates. 

No doubt since the days of Pearson the Greats 
course has in some ways been modified. It has been 
impossible wholly to exclude the influence of European 
intellectual progress. In the department of ancient 
history, in particular, the influence of Mommsen, and 
of some able teachers in Oxford, has produced a far 
more detailed study and a far more precise knowledge 
of political development, and of the constitutions of 
ancient states, more particularly of the government of 
the Boman Empire. The mere faculty of putting 
things, apart from solid knowledge, would certcdnly 
not go so far to-day as thirty years ago. 

How deep the results of the change may be I can- 

^ 0. H. Pearson, Av^xMograpky^ p. 51. 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 37 

not profess to know. No one could really tell who 
had not been an examiner in recent years. But it 
will scarcely be denied that the rhetorical element is 
still prominent in the litterse Humaniores course. 
The importance attached to essay-writing must neces- 
sarily still foster that complacency and that habit of 
concealing ignorance which shocked the intellectual 
conscience of Mr Pearson. And anyone who is at all 
used to modem research must know that youths of 
one-and-twenty cannot in two years acquire any 
sound and satisfactory mastery of so vast a field as 
that ranged over by the examiners in the schools. 
This examining must require almost as long and 
careful a training, and be as much under the 
rule of tradition, as the augural profession at Bome. 
One has to know exactly what to expect, what is 
possible under the conditions, how far knowledge 
in one subject may fairly balance ignorance in 
another. 

Those who are identified with the system at Oxford 
are usually attached to it with a conviction which is 
its best justification. But when, as rarely happens^ 
a judge from without comes into contact with its 
tendencies, he is seldom entirely satisfied. Thus 
the late professor of poetry, Mr Courthope, who was 
bound ex officio to examine some of the exercises of 
the most brilliant undergraduates, writes of those 
exercises : 

'* I note in the essays a failure of power to treat a 
subject as a whole, a tendency to cultivate style as a 
thing desirable in itself apart from the subject-matter, 
and, on the otiber hand, a passion for making points 



38 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

and epigrams without any regard to perspective and 
proportion." ^ 

This judgment, by a very sound and accomplished 
critic, is hardly reassuring, especially since the faults of 
which the critic speaks are precisely those which belong 
to a too rhetorical bent in education, and Mr Courthope 
speaks as a man of literary taste and culture, not as a 
votary of historic science. His measure is by no means 
so rigid as Mr Pearson's. 

IV. 

It can scarcely be realized by teachers at Oxford 
that the dominant system is, in fact, one of protection. 
A path of orthodoxy, not, of course, in opinion, but in 
choice of subjects for study, is clearly marked out 
Any deviation to the right or the left of the path is 
frowned upon as waste of time. And not only is 
there no encouragement to proceed further than the 
needful point on this road, but the notion exists that 
any sort of research, or specialism as it is termed, 
outside a certain line, is a poor and contemptible thing, 
innocent enough, but scarcely the concern of any man 
of intellectual ability and ambition. 

Thus it has come about that the teaching of the 
Humanities at Oxford is remarkably defective on the 
side which has of late years been most full of life and 
growth, the study of the extant remains of antig[uity. 
There has taken place, as all scholars are aware,^ during 
the last half century a sort of renascence in the historic 
study of antiquity in consequence of the numerous and 

^ Courthope, Life in Poetry and Law in Taste, p. 438. 
2 See especially Sir R. 0. Jebb's Humanism in Ediication. 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 39 

extensive excavations and discoveries which have taken 
place in southern Europe and western Asia. Egypt 
and Babylon have, as it were, risen from the grave to 
instruct mankind as regards the origins of civilization. 
The soil of Greece and of Italy has been more 
systematically explored, with the result that where the 
historians of fifty years ago had no clue to the facts of 
history before the time of Cyrus and Croesus except 
their own ingenuity, we have, a constantly accumulating 
storehouse of material, in buildings and pottery, sculp- 
ture and inscriptions, which take back the beginnings 
of European culture into the third millennium. And 
for comparison with the narratives of Greek and Soman 
historians we have now a fast-increasing mass of facts 
— geographic, topographic, monumental, inscriptional — 
which must needs put our study of those writers on 
quite a new plane. We are no longer obliged to 
accept or reject their statements on subjective grounds, 
or to treat them as mere literature, but we are bound 
to examine them as witnesses and to try to pass beyond 
them to the truth of fact. 

An archaeological revolution in the field of ancient 
history is in full course among the universities and 
learned academies of Europe. Everywhere it is giving 
life to what had become dull and freshness to what 
had become trite. Even the study of classical literature 
has risen to another level since we have so far more 
accurate a knowledge of the bed of civilization on 
which it flowered, and since in the history of Greek 
art we have a development parallel to that of literature 
in every period, and often far more easy to trace. 

In most of the universities of Europe and of 



40 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

America the new classical archaeology has been gladly 
welcomed as an ally and a friend. It is hardly too 
much to say that at Oxford it has generally been 
regarded with feelings of dismay, not as an ally, but 
as a rival or an enemy. It could not be wholly 
excluded from the Oxford course in litterae Humaniores, 
but there was assigned to it the smallest place possible, 
that of a special or extra subject, which was in no 
way an alternative. 

A few facts will put in strong relief the cleavage 
which has thus been introduced between Oxford and 
foreign imiversities. At Oxford in January 1902 there 
were announced in the lists ninety-eight lectures in 
classics for honour students : of these, five only were 
in archaeology. At Harvard in the report for 1900-1 
twenty-eight courses in classics were reported, omitting 
those which were elementary: of these, six were in 
archaeology, and in two of these attendances of 387 and 
108 were reported, the highest attendance at a non- 
archaeological course being 36. At Oxford, where 
classical lecturers are counted by the score, there is 
but one university professor of archaeology, with the 
precarious assistance of two or three college lecturers. 
At Berlin, where the whole number of university 
teachers in the classical field appears to be twenty-three,^ 
eight of these lecture wholly or in part on Greek 
and Roman art and inscriptions. At Oxford, Greek 
and Soman inscriptions are seldom the subjects of 
lectures, and when such lectures are given, the classes 
afe extremely small. At Harvard, the lectures on 

^ It is difficult to give precise figures, on account of overlapping of 

subjects. 



I 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 41 

ancient art have long been attended by almost all 
cultivated students, even by many who are working at 
other subjects than the Classics. And worst of all, 
while at the Germcm universities the main strength of 
the archaeological teaching lies in the seminar and 
in personal contact with facts, the Oxford student who 
has turned the pages of a text-book on the history of 
ancient art, or spent a few evenings over Hicks' 
Historical Inscriptiana, has the audacity to write 
about such matters with the confidence which ignorance 
alone can give. 

As I write, I receive the programme of the annual 
meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America at 
Princeton* The meeting lasts three days; thirty- 
seven papers are announced for reading. Nearly all 
of these are by classical professors and instructors in 
the American universities, and all but two or three 
are concerned with points in classical archaeology, 
antiquities, or palaeography. Nothing could more 
clearly exhibit the keen interest taken by classical 
teachers in America in every new fact in regard to 
Greece and Bome brought to light by modem excava- 
tion and research. 

Even between Oxford and Cambridge there is a 
great difference in the reception given to archaeology. 
Cambridge has, for the last quarter of a century, 
treated it with justice, if not with cordiality. Of 
the five branches of the second part of the Classical 
Tripos, archaeology is one, standing on the same 
footing as philosophy and history. And in the new 
regulations for the first part of the Tripos, a good 
position is assigned to it. In this examination, leaving 



42 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

oat of account the papers in translation and composition, 
there are six papers besides. One is in grammar and 
criticism, two are in Greek and Eoman history and 
antiquities, one is an essay paper. The remaining 
two papers are assigned to the subjects : (1) philosophy, 
(2) literature, (3) sculpture and architecture, it being 
prescribed that an equal weight shall be assigned to 
each of the three subjects, which are, of course, more 
or less alternative. Thus in future no man will take 
classical honours at Cambridge without having an 
opportunity of giving a good share of his time to 
archaeological study, and without the certainty that 
proficiency in such study will stand him in good stead 
in the examinations.^ This is free trade; and if 
archaeology does not henceforth flourish at Cambridge, 
the university regulations can bear no share of the 
blame. Instead of this free trade, we have at 
Oxford, as I have already observed, a rigid system 
of protection. 

But at Oxford the common cry is that archaeology^^. 

is "specialism." Every man of culture is bound, it 
seenisr lo'know in detail the Ai^stotelian Ipgic ; but 
it is specialism to know in outline the -bistory-^of 
ancient art,. or. the .principles of .Greek andJBoman 
religion. Everybody who pretends to education 
should know what were the duties of the Eoman 
Praetors or what the changes in the Athenian 
constitution, but no classically educated man need 

^ I learn on yery good authority that already there are large 
classes in Greek sctdptore, and a Cambridge lecturer, who is not an 
archffiologist, informs me that some of the ablest men are showing 
much interest in the subject. 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 43 

be ashamed to own that he knows nothing of Pheidias 
and Praxiteles except their names, and that the 
marvellous harvests of Olympia and Mycenae and 
Delphi are outside his ken. One cannot criticize 
such views, one can only, call them preposterous. 

Let me quote on this subject the words of one whose 
authority as regards Greek literature will scarcely be 
questioned^: " Even a limited knowledge of Greek art 
is obviously of the greatest value to a student of 
classical literature ; not merely, of course, as a key to 
allusions, but often in a far deeper sense, as throwing 
light on the spirit which animates both monuments 
and books. I repeat, even a limited knowledge of 
classical art has that use, a knowledge which stops far 
short of the equipment requisite for a specialist in the 
subject." 

Similarly one of the most accomplished of the 
philologists of Germany 2 has expressed his conviction 
that archaeological instruction is a necessary part of 
philological training. Among recently deceased sons 
of Oxford who have been greatly interested in Greek 
art, I would name Walter Pater, Lewis Nettleship, 
and Cecil Bhodes. 

Another opinion which would seem, to judge from 
letters to the Oxford Magazine, to be prevalent, is 
that Greek art is a subject to be l^r^tiirpid on by 
artists only, and only to students of art. Those who 
give voice to this absurdity do not seem to know the 
difference between history and practice. Can no one 
but a play-writer lecture on Greek dramas, and do 

^ R. C. Jebb, H'wmanism in Education, p. 29. 

"^ T. Wilamowitz Moellendorff, RedUn %md Vortrage, p. 106. 



44 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

such dramas only concern those who are going on the 
stage ? Greek dramas and Greek temples are parallel 
embodiments of the Greek spirit, and he who would 
understand that spirit must know something of both. 
It is not with a view to practice that such things are 
studied, nor merely to produce aesthetic pleasure, 
though pleasure will follow in its place. The study 
IB historic ; and Greek history, whether of politics or 
colonization or trade or religion or literature or art, is 
all one ; and every branch throws back light on the 
other branches. But if we are to compare the import- 
ance of different branches of history, it must be allowed 
that the example of Greece is far more important to 
us in literature, in art, and in philosophy than in 
political organizatioiL 

It is thus abundantly clear that the view officially 
taken at Oxford as to the greater importance of certain 
parts of ancient history, which are included in the 
course while others are excluded, is a thoroughly 
superficial view, one adopted nowhere else, and one 
quite unworthy of a great university. It is, in fact, a 
survival from a time when such views were possible 
into a time when they are impossible. 

Probably the insufficient appreciation of the history 
of Greek art at Oxford is not unconnected with the 
general attitude of the English mind in the teaching 
of the history of art. We have great painters, but 
the English art training is very far below the level of 
that of France and Germany. This great defect in 
our national training lies deep, and is visible every- 
where. Boys pass through our public schools without 
receiving any systematic training of the eyes, or any 



CRITICISM OF OXFORD COURSE IN HUMANITY 45 

notion that a work of art ia something better than a 
cibrio. They come to the university, as I know well, 
usually quite unaocustomed either to observe with 
accuracy or to describe with accuracy what they see. 
But what an enormous diminution and impoverish- 
ment this involves in the satisfaction of life. I speak 
not only of the pleasure of enjoying what is beautiful, 
a pleasure which in our days involves much pain, 
from the ugliness of our surroundings. But I refer 
specially to the faculty of discerning the meaning and 
the historic bearing of the works of man. Every artistic 
production of man is like a fossil which preserves from 
one age to another the record of a stage of life. Every 
touch of the chisel in a statue, every line in a paint- 
ing, is what it is because of the interworking of a 
hundred ideas and tendencies ; of every work it may 
be said, as truly as of Tennyson's flower, that he who 
knows it all in all knows what God and man are. The 
life-giving and ennobling ideas which are embodied in 
Greek civilization are to be traced even in the most 
modest works of the Greek workman, the terra-cotta 
figure made to be broken at the grave, the lady's 
mirror, the coin destined for the fishmarket. But in 
the higher plastic art of Hellas, as in the great dramas 
and epics, these ideas appear in their simplest and 
noblest guise. 

Almost all English people of education spend part 
of their time in Continental museums and picture 
galleries, but that time is mostly wasted, because they 
have no notion how to look, or what to look for. 
When one sees them sitting in silent worship before 
works such as the Apollo Belvedere or the Laocoon, 



46 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

one wonders what is passing in their minds. They 
are often astonished to learn that in London, at their 
own doors, are works of much higher and nobler art 

Oxford is not a place where practical artists can be 
trained, or where more than the rudiments of the 
history of art ccm be taught. As young surgeons 
can be trained only in great hospitals, so art students 
and critics can be fully trained only in great galleries 
and museums. But there is no reason why we should 
neglect recognized parts of classical and historic train- 
ing, branches of knowledge everywhere allowed to be 
an important part of culture, merely because they 
involve some study of art. 

Even if it be allowed that Oxford cannot hope in a 
brief space of time to do much to correct or supple- 
ment national deficiencies in this matter, at least she 
is able to do the special duty which falls to a 
university devoted to the Classics, by seeing that her 
own classical culture is not dwarfed and warped by 
an insufGicient attention to that art which in the time 
of the Renascence fascinated the attention of the 
learned no less than did the works of Plato and of 
Homer. A classical culture which omits from its 
view one whole side, and in some ways the most 
characteristic side, of Greek life, stands in any broad 
view of historic development as a poor and half- 
developed thing. 



CHAPTEE III 

BESEABCH AT OXFORD 

But the worst side of the course of litterde Humaniores 
is, perhaps, neither its encouragement of superficiality 
nor its onesidedness, but its exclusion of personal re-^^^ 
search andr coutaat with fact, its discouragement of all 
advanced study. I am far from asserting that there 
is any irreconcilable antagonism between something 
like the present course and research. But taking 
matters as they stand, it can scarcely be denied that 
the atmosphere produced by the present type of 
classical study is one in which it is difficult for a 
spirit of research to live. 

L 

It is precisely in the value attached to research 
that the universities of the Continent and of America 
differ most from Oxford and Cambridge. Of the 
German respect for research it is unnecessary to speak : 
it is by this that intellectual rank in Germany is 
acquired : it is this which lies at the root of German 
primacy in the world of science. The American 

47 



48 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

univeraities follow (Jermany closely. A teacher would 
not usually be elected to a professorship in even a 
small American university who had not given some 
guarantee that he knew how to use authorities and 
search out facts. In each of the larger American 
universities there are some two or three hundred men 
pursuing what are called graduate courses, that is, 
working on some definite subject with a view to 
training and result. The system is so new that the 
results are scarcely yet apparent. 

I am not, of course, under the impression that it is 
reserved for me, in this twentieth century, to call 
attention to the deficiency of Oxford on the side of 
historic science and of research. I am merely echoing 
the voices of men who, in the last generation, were 
the pride of the University. The most outspoken of 
them all was a man who was never silent through 
want of courage, Matthew Arnold, who, in the remark- 
able concluding chapter of his Higher Schools and 
Universities in Germany, told us home truths without 
stint. And who could possibly have so good a 
right to do so as a son of Thomas Arnold, a devoted 
Oxonian if ever there was one, a man thoroughly con- 
versant with the educational systems of Europe, and 
the greatest of modern critics ? 

" The want of the idea of science, of systematic 
knowledge is, as I have said again and again, the 
capital want, at this moment, of English education 
and of English life; it is the university, or the 
superior school, which ought to foster this idea. The 
university or the superior school ought to pirovide 
facilities, after the general education is finished, for 



RESEARCH AT OXFORD 49 

the young man to go on in the line where his special 
aptitudes lead him, be it that of languages and 
literature, of mathematics, of the natural sciences, of 
the application of these sciences, or any other line, and 
follow the studies of this line systematically under 
first-rate teaching. Our great universities, Oxford and 
Cambridge, do next to nothing towards this end. . . . 
They are still, in fact, schools, and do not carry educa- 
tion beyond the stage of general and school education." 

The whole of this chapter in Matthew Arnold is a 
wonderful example of prophecy, a prophecy based not 
on second sight of the future, but on insight into the 
present In many respects the writer forecasted 
coming events incorrectly, but he saw, with marvellous 
insight, how affairs were drifting. If one turns from 
the newspapers, the magazines, the politics and the 
trade reports of to-day to this chapter written thirty 
years ago, one realizes how the future lies hidden in 
the present, and can be in a degree seen before it 
comes to pass. 

Matthew Arnold foresaw the rise of young uni- 
versities in the great cities of England, as they ate 
rising to-day, and he foresaw the difficulties with 
which they would have to contend. The future of 
Oxford he did not clearly see; but he was half 
disposed to think that it would remain a fumt lycSe 
for the education of the lefsured classes, while the 
training of the nation would pass to othera Certainly 
that is one of the alternatives which lie before the 
University; but are we content to accept it? 

Another brilliant son of Oxford, Professor Henry 
Nettleship, published twenty-five years ago a most 

4 



50 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

earnest protest against the neglect of higher study at 
Oxford. Mr Nettleship wrote not in the interests of 
historic study so much as in those of higher criticism 
and philology. He had been a master at Harrow, and 
fully appreciated the merits of the English public 
school. He wrote ^ : *' The familiar moral and social 
type of character developed by the English public 
school is, in many respects, a high and manly type, 
but it is on the whole unfavourable to the cultivation 
of learning, and to sympathy with it. Such are the 
conditions of life in our great schools as to make the 
thorough pursuit of learning in any branch of know- 
ledge extremely difficult; in general, indeed, im- 
possible.* But in the universities, it may be supposed, 
with larger opportunities and abundance of leisure, the 
pursuit of learning is actively carried on. It cannot, 
however, be said that the English universities im- 
plant in their students either a love of research or a 
knowledge of its methods. An average first-class man 
at Oxford or Cambridge has read and mastered the 
contents of a considerable number of classical books, 
and (at least at Oxford) has jwjquired a tincture of 
modem philosophical culture, and a ready power of 
expressing himself on paper. But his knowledge has 
been gained almost entirely in the form of results, and 
with the dkectly practical aim of succeeding in the 
examinations and assuring him a good start in life. 
The attitude of the students and the teachers at the 

^ Essays on the Endowment of Research, Essay 10. I abridge the 
passage quoted, but alter no words. 

^ The more recent testimony of Mr Benson to the same effect is 
quoted above, at p. 10. 



RESEARCH AT OXFORD 51 

universities towards the subjects of study has a 
tendency to be professional rather than scientific. 
Knowledge is worked up and dealt out for the pur- 
poses of the market, not pursued and communicated 
as a life-giving means of culture. 

" Classical teachers have regarded their subject too 
exclusively as a means of training, or of information, 
or of enjoyment, forgetting that like any other branch 
of knowledge it requires fresh and constant cultivation, 
that the field of classical research is in no sense worked 
out. When it is recognised that classical study is an 
essential part of the growing body of knowledge, and 
of paramount importance as the key to a great chapter 
of human history, classical students will have a clear 
aim and a hope of fruit, and the spirit of Icmguor and 
compromise will disappear." 

It will occur to some readers, especially such as are 
not resident at the great universities, that statements 
written of them thirty years ago will not now apply. 
The pity of it is that they apply so nearly to the 
universities to-day. I am not speaking of physical 
science, which is not my affair. Nor can I venture 
to speak in regard to Cambridge, for though a 
graduate of that university, I have not closely followed 
the recent changes in the classical course, changes, 
indeed, so recent that their results are not yet 
apparent. But speaking of the study and teaching 
of the Humanities at Oxford, I fear that there is much 
in the papers of Matthew Arnold and Mr Nettleship 
which even now holds good. Having resided and 
taught at Oxford for the last fifteen years, I am 
deliberately of opinion that during that time the 



52 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

current has been setting, not in the direction of higher 
stndy and expansion, but in that of greater restriction 
and distrust of knowledge. 

Afl regards the encouragement of research in the 
University, much has to be done, I do not say to place 
Oxford on a level with foreign universities, but to bring 
her even to a moderate level of efficiency. There are 
two kinds of researchers, the researcher who also 
teaches, and the researcher who merely investigates. 
Both need to be produced and encouraged among us. 
At the present time the system of the place tells 
heavily against both. 

At present college tutors, and even some of the 
professors, are so completely taken up with pupils that 
they have little time and energy for private work. And 
even in the vacations many are either occupied with 
examining work, or too tired to feel the spring and 
energy without which good work is impossible. Now, 
it is generally allowed that teaching becomes flat and 
stale unless the teacher has time to read in his own 
subject, to keep himself abreast of all that is being 
done in it, and to produce good work of his own. It 
is not merely that pupils will want to know the latest 
views, but that without original work every teacher must 
soon lose interest and heart, and cease to have any 
enthusiasm himself or to be a source of enthusiasm to 
others. Merely to follow the views of the latest Grerman 
writers is a poor thing ; one must join the hunt and try 
oneself to capture the quarry. How little this is felt 
among us is evidenced by the languishing condition 
of the Oxford Philological Society, the only society of 
classical research. 



RESEARCH AT OXFORD 53 

We are far too much under the dominion of the 
notion, in a great degree false, that the purpose of the 
University is education only, whereas, as has often 
been pointed out, alike the purposes of our founders 
and the circumstances of the age should make us 
regard study and research as quite as much our buisi- 
ness as teaching. Examinations which should be a 
means have become to us an end, and many teachers 
never look beyond them. It is not as if we sacrificed 
learning to moral training: what moral training is 
there in preparing a youth to "score" in examina- 
tions? It is that our intellectual ideal is too low, 
that we have little real belief in knowledge, and only 
try to thrust men into a niche, so that they may make 
a living. 

If all scientific workers are in a sense priests, the 
monks of science are the researchers who do not teach, 
but are solely occupied with investigation and dis- 
covery. These fare very badly indeed with us. Some 
of the most celebrated researchers in Oxford, on the 
historic side, are men of private means, who choose to 
devote their resources to this purpose, and who stand 
almost outside the University system. Occasionally a 
Fellowship is given to a man who undertakes to do a 
piece of research. This is better than nothing, but yet an 
imperfect way of promoting the object. The Fellowship 
is always for a limited period, and the holder is perfectly 
aware that if he works on usefully, but obscurely, he 
will at the end of his tenure find himself face to face 
with destitution. Under such circumstances, who could 
fearlessly devote himself to research ? Naturally the 
Fellow tries to do some piece of work which will show 



I 
54 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS ! 

and be appreciated, and give him a good chance in 
competing for teaching appointments. Of course it is 
necessary to guard against the danger that a man 
appointed to do work of research might be idle or give 
most of his time to work of another kind, for the i 

subtle poison which emanates from the worship of j 

examinations is apt to corrupt even those who are . 

occupied with research. Doubtless it is necessary to ' 

make sure in some way that a research Fellow honestly 
devotes himself to his work. But this may best be 
done by a better organization of research, not by the 
crude methods at present in use. 

Oxford has perhaps more funds which could be 
devoted to the promotion of research than any English 
university. The Founders who gave those funds did 
not, of course, destine them for the encouragement 
of research, because in their days the horizon was 
different. But they did intend to encourage such 
studies as in those days had vogue, which then held 
the same place in the intellectual world which research 
now holds. Certainly they did not mainly intend 
their funds to support teaching. The Founder of 
Queen's College expressly states that he endowed that 
college with money in order that its tenants should 
not be driven to make money by teaching.-^ The 
great foundation of All Souls' seems made for the 
endowment of research; but instead of being thus 
used, its Fellowships are held by rising young | 

barristers, or even members of the Indian Civil 
Service. Meantime Mr Carnegie founds in America 

^ It is but fair to say that Queen's College has in recent years done 
more for Classical Research than, perhaps, any college. 



RESEARCH AT OXFORD 55 

an Institute which is to be solely devoted to research 
and discovery, and endows it with vast resources. 
Mr Carnegie doubtless is thinking primarily of physical 
science and of industry ; but it would be well if we 
had the same zeal for knowledge combined with a 
wider conception of the realm of knowledge. 

Ab I have already said, T do not propose to speak 
of the part taken by Oxford in physical science and 
research. But it is in our way to consider what 
Oxford is doing for the promotion of such knowledge 
as is her traditional province. Some brilliant pieces 
of historic research have been done by Oxford men. 
The names of Mr Arthur Evans and Mr Grenfell, in 
particular, are familiar in all the universities and 
academies of learning in Europe. But if it be in- 
quired what part of the funds required for the researches 
of these scholars is provided by the University, the 
answer is anything but satisfactory. Some of our 
discoverers strain their private means; some receive 
subsidies from the other side of the Atlantic, and the 
shame of this last fact does not seem to burn us 
seriously. A very few Fellowships have been bestowed 
on classical researchers, and the University has paid a 
few subscriptions to such institutions as the Schools 
of Athens and Eome, or to excavation funds. It has 
not attempted to organize research. 

Statutes have indeed been passed for the conferment 
of new degrees — B.Litt. and B.Sc. — on those who have 
done advanced work in the University. A few students 
from inside and outside have taken those degrees, but 
such students have to prepare themselves as best they 
can; they find here neither the seminar nor such 



56 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

advanced teaching as they require. Cases have 
come within my knowledge in which Americans 
intending to take a graduate course have come to 
Oxford, and, finding no such help and superinten- 
dence as they required, have reluctantly ^gone on to 
Germany. 

The Craven Foundation exists in order to encourage 
Oxford men to pursue higher study alter their degrees. 
The difficulty of satisfactorily filling up these Fellow- 
ships has decidedly increased, and sometimes satis- 
factory candidates are not forthcoming. The same 
thing is true of the studentships held at the School 
of Athens. The Oxford men who do go abroad on 
these foundations are seldom in a condition duly to 
profit by their opportunities. Having passed the final 
examination at Oxford, they think themselves above 
going to the lectures of specialists or doing the 
drudgery with which all real investigation must begin. 
And never having been trained in the methods of 
research, they do not know how to set about their 
work. The Grerman and French students, armed with 
all modem appliances, filling their note-books with 
systematic knowledge, always on the alert to find 
what is new or unpublished, are a marvel to them. 
A few, who have an inborn talent for research, 
triumph in spite of all obstacles, make their own 
methods, and do admirable work. But the system, 
or want of system, is very wasteful The best men 
waste years in learning abroad the methods they 
might very well have learned at home, and in follow- 
ing blind alleys against which they had never been 
warned. 



RESEARCH AT OXFORD 57 

In faot, in relation to research Oxford stands where 
the universities of France and America stood thirty 
years ago. They have changed; we remain un- 
changed. 

11. 

As regards the value of historic research work, 
Oxford teachers seem sometimes to be the victims of 
a curious misapprehension. They cite this or that 
Grerman or American monograph which is occupied 
with sopie minute point of criticism or archseology, 
the details of a battle, the origin of a custom, the 
authorship of a statue, and they ask in triumph what 
value attaches to such minutise. How can they 
matter to us in the twentieth century? If these 
objectors carried out this view consistently, they 
would range themselves on the side of the ordinary 
PhUistine who sees no good in learning dead languages, 
or on the side of the Arab chief who asked Layard 
what was the use of inquiring about the dirt which 
the infidels ate before the coming of the true faith. 
But, of course, they are not consistent. Teachers on 
the classical side in our old universities think that 
to discover the precise usage of words by Greek and 
Latin writers is a matter worthy of the greatest pains, 
for exact scholarship has prestige. And Oxford 
scholars except certain cases, as it were, in the desert 
of ancient history as interesting to all men of culture. 
The philosophic theories of Plato and Aristotle, the 
organization of the Eoman government, and a few 
other such subjects, sometimes almost fortuitously 
selected, are held to be things worthy of scholarly 



58 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

research; but the rest of ancient historic lore is 
treated like quartz which contains too few grains of 
gold to the ton to be worth crushing. 

All this is scarcely defensible. The root of it is 
a notion that the value of classical research lies in the 
facts established, whereas it lies really in the research 
itself. If we turn to the analogies of natural science, 
this will become quite clear. The biological researcher 
will give years of his life to the investigation of some 
detail of animal organization, such as the breathing 
apparatus of crabs or the sucking apparatus of 
fleas. The value of his results is not direct. The 
minute study of crabs probably does not help fishermen 
to catch them, nor does the study of the organs of 
fleas aid us in our warfare with those active enemies 
of mankind. But it is recognized that he who in 
any direction pushes back in the least degree the 
walls of ignorance does a service to the cause of 
science. Every fact, however humble, is sacred. And 
it is also recognized that the close study of some 
minute comer of the field of biology is a necessary 
training of the powers of any man who aspires to be 
a biologist. Only thus can he acquire a habit of 
patient attention to detail, an almost religious venera- 
tion for the smallest particle of actual fact, an entire 
reliance on the consistency of natural law in the 
universe. Only thus does he cease to be a dilettante 
and becomes a master. 

The case is really precisely the same in historic 
investigations. These also are not usually made 
fruitful by the worth of the results for any im- 
mediate or practical purpose. But history as much 



RESEARCH AT OXFORD 59 

as biology is a branch of science, and any truth, 
however minute, is a brick in the magnificent palace 
of history. Nor can anyone tell which facts will be 
in the long run most serviceable in the construction 
of that palace. I venture to speak from thirty years' 
experience in this matter. Bepeatedly I have seen 
some fact revealed by inscription or papyrus, seemingly 
of little value, suddenly sought out and erected by 
great scholars into a comer-^tone of knowledge. I 
have seen wide-spreading theories collapse before the 
touch of a fragment of terra-cotta or a coin. I have 
seen a number of apparently unconnected observations 
suddenly connected into a solid edifice by a coping- 
stone of probable theory; Those who live among the 
results of research soon begin to feel that every 
clearly-established fact has a value, apart from its 
immediate bearings. 

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge may sound 
as dubious and as unmoral a phrase as art for art's 
sake. In fact, in the acquisition of knowledge as much 
as in the production of works of art, ideal purpose is 
necessary to raise the worker to a higher level, and 
to give dignity to his life. Knowledge in itself will 
no more necessarily make a man than will skill in 
painting, or fine scholarship, or delicate taste. But 
I venture to say that even from the ethical point of 
view research has high claims on tbe universities. 
As a mental and moral tonic nothing can be more 
effective than the search for fact: the more deeply 
the fact is hidden, the longer and severer the search, 
the more stimulating it grows. And the qualities 
which it inculcates — ^patience, distrust of mere theories. 



6o OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

delight in what will bear the test — are of great value 
in life. By degrees, as one learns how to proceed, one 
finds keys which will unlock door after door, until the 
whole world of history ceases to be an irregular and 
arbitrary collection of events, and becomes a scene of 
law and order, though not of law so fixed and definite 
as that in the world of nature. 

It may be said that I am laying upon Oxford blame 
which more properly attaches to the whole country. 
Eesearch leads to no openings in life, and parents and 
guardians are an even more fatal barrier than is the 
college tutor in the way of those who would fain 
devote themselves to it. But this general neglect of 
higher study is in part the result of the attitude taken 
towards it at Oxford and Cambridge. The influence 
of the newer and smaller universities is already be- 
ginning to tell in the other direction. The Scotch 
universities still sometimes appoint to their classical 
professorships young men fresh from the final schools 
and entirely destitute of any experience or understand- 
ing of higher study.^ But at the Welsh colleges and 
elsewhere, it has already become customary to give the 
preference to scholars who have done first-hand work. 
In this direction there lies some hope. But at present 
these rising universities are so cramped for funds, and 
so straitened by the demand of their students for 
practical bread-and-butter teaching, that they are 
powerless to give effect to their respect for knowledge. 

1 An extreme instance occurred a few years ago, when a young Oxford 
man was elected to a Scotch Professorship of Greek, and took the 
occasion of his inaugural address to his students, not to apologize for 
his ignorance of modern historic and archseologic research, which at his 
age might well be excused, but to boast of it. 



RESEARCH AT OXFORD 6i 

The ball is still at the feet of Oxford, but she shows 
little desire to set it going. 

Events now seem to indicate that the Rhodes 
students who come to Oxford from America will be 
in large proportion advanced students who intend to 
follow up some line of study or research. It seems to 
be generally agreed, on both sides of the Atlantic, that 
whatever may be the precise expressions used in Mr 
Ehodes' will, his real purpose will be better served 
by sending to Oxford from America men of older 
standing than by sending youths fresh from school, 
who would do little good to Oxford, and spoil their 
own careers at home. And fortunately Mr Bhodes 
has not fixed any limit of age. 

It seems really not impossible that, if we go on 
unmoved in our isolation, in a few years we may see 
at Oxford a number of foreign advanced students and 
researchers exploiting the wealth of the Bodleian 
Library, contributing to all the learned journals, using 
the apparatus of research, while the English students 
go stolidly on their way, regarding such matters as 
suitable to those who have had the misfortune to be 
born abroad, but of no account to the real Oxford 
man. Is this a future to which we can look forward 
with equanimity? Truly it is time to consider our 
ways. 



CHAPTER IV 

DEFENCE OF THE CLASSICS 

The defects of which I have spoken as marking our 
present course in Litterae Humaniores are not all of 
them fundamental. Some at least of them may be 
removed, as I hope presently to show, without any 
startling or profound changes in the course. But 
before I proceed to submit to my colleagues such 
suggestions in the direction of reform as I am able to 
make, I must for a time turn to a more general con- 
sideration of the relation held by classical studies to 
university education. We cannot in reason expect to 
set forth a really good course in litteraj Humaniores 
until we have decided what should be the ideal at 
which such a course should aim. There is the further 
question whether any course in the subject is a sound 
base for modern education. 

I propose, then, first to attempt to justify the 
claim of the Classics to a foremost place even in the 
most modern and progressive system of education ; and 
next to consider what kind of training in litterse 
Humaniores will best suit modem conditions, as I 
understand them. 

62 



DEFENCE OF THE CLASSICS 63 



N 



The present is emphaticjally a time when those who 
believe in a classical education, who think that the 
study of antiquity is the best preparation for the 
life of the present, should put their house in order. 
At intervals, during the last half century, a strong 
demand has arisen in Germany that education, when 
literary and humanistic rather than concerned with 
nature, should be based on modem languages and 
modem literature, rather than on those of Greece and 
Kome. The attack upon the classical foundation of 
education has been repulsed over and over again, but 
the assault is continually repeated. One of the 
greatest authorities on German education, Professor 
Paulsen of Berlin, is using all his weight for the 
purpose of substituting a more exact study of German, 
and of modern civilization for a study of the Greek 
and Boman languages and literature. In France the 
Minister of Education, whose authority over schools 
and universities is quite despotic, is moving in the 
direction of the limitation of classical work in them, 
and the substitution of modem literature and history. 
From friends in other countries of Europe, I learn 
that the same wave of tendency is spreading there 
also. It is due, not so much to the changed con- 
victions of the best authorities, as to a popular move- 
ment of parents against the " dead " and in favour of 
the living languages. Nothing can be more certain 
than that it is not by mere prestige or tradition that 
classics can hold their old place in the education of 
the twentieth century. Like everything in our days, 



64 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

thej will be tried by the test of fruits, by the impera- 
tive demand of national and individual efficiency. 

The demand for efficiency is an undeniably good 
demand ; it is the first demand of nature as well as of 
society. But the demand for efficiency in education 
may eanly be perverted. The most obvious form of 
efficiency is manufacturing and commercial success; 
and short-eighted men, dazzled by Una kind of success, 
demand that education shall be conducted with im- 
mediate reference to it. Thus they put ''living" 
languages in the for^ound, and instal technical in- 
struction, which helps a man in the actual work of 
manufacture and commerce, in the first place, and 
claim that it shall be substituted for more general 
training, and espedally for such " useless " subjects as 
history and the classical languages. There are many 
'' practical and experienced " men in our great cities 
who take this view. Yet if ever a view was utterly 
refuted by practice and experience, it is this. 

If anything has been proved in the history of edu- 
cation during the last half century, it is that mere 
technical instruction in detail does not produce the 
highest efficiency. It is here that many so-called 
practical men are mistaken. The practical is often 
confused with the obvious, and those who see only the 
obvious see a very little way. Students and workers 
who merely receive practical instaruction in technical 
schools learn the routine of a trade, the current ways 
of meeting difficulties. But they learn unintelligently; 
their minds are not exercised and trained, and so any 
new discovery of importance is likely altogether to 
frustrate them. It is necessary to learn, not only how 



DEFENCE OF THE CLASSICS 65 

machinery works, but the principles involved in it, 
the great laws of mathematics, of mechanics, and 
chemistry. One must enter to some degree into the 
secrets of nature, and see how nature works, before 
one can hope to use natural forces working by natural 
law for the purposes of material civilization. 

Thus before a man can plan a steamship, or build a 
bridge, or even invent a new soap, he must commonly 
have a broad and deep education in the sciences of 
nature from mathematics upwards. And we may go 
further still and say that for full efi&ciency the most 
practical man requires a thorough drilling in the use 
of words, some acquaintance with literature and 
history, and especially some systematic knowledge of 
mankind, of men as individuals and of men in society. 
And above all, he needs to be inspired with a pure 
love of knowledge for its own sake. Science is a 
fastidious mistress, and seldom reveals her secrets to 
those who only desire to make profit of them: her 
choicest favours she reserves for those who love her 
only for her own sake, and without thought of 
reward. 

The case is much the same in regard to modern 
languages. For immediate commercial purposes they 
are more obviously useful than Latin and Greek. 
And it may at once be confessed that the learning 
of French and German has been grossly and disgrace- 
fully neglected in English schools. It is simply 
shocking to find, as one constantly does find, clever 
youths who can barely puzzle out a page of French, 
and do not know a word of German. But still, the 
great question is whether modern languages can 

5 



66 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

supply as good a basis for education as the ancient, 
whether they afiford an equally good and "athletic" 
training to the mind. 

The question of the value of a classical basis in 
education falls into two parts : first as regards school 
or more elementary education, second as regards the 
more advanced education which ought at least to be 
given at the universities. At schools the great 
advantage of a classical basis is that it trains boys 
in mental precision and accuracy in a way in which 
no other study can train them. It is only a dead 
langui^e, which cannot be picked up in conversation, 
but must be learned grammatically and by rule, which 
gives real training in the use of words to express 
thought and feeling. It is no doubt important also 
to lead boya beyond words to things, to train them in 
observation and enjoyment of nature and art. But it 
seems to be proved by experience that the study of 
natural science combined with the teaching of modem 
languages does not develop the faculties so satisfactorily 
as a classical training. 

This question has been worked out thoroughly in 
Germany, and, on the whole, the Classics have held 
their ground well. For some decades past there has 
been a competition between the Gymnasium in which 
the Classics are the basis of education, and the 
Bealschule, in which modern languages and elemen- 
tary science are substituted for them. In 1880 the 
Prussian Ministry of Instruction referred to the 
boards of professors of the imiversities the question 
whether they found the pupils from the Gymnasia or 
those from the Bealschulen best equipped for the 



DEFENCE OF THE CLASSICS 67 

university courses in various branches of knowledge. 
The tale has often been told, but it may be well here 
to tell again a small part of it. 

In reply to the enquiries of the Minister, the 
Philosophical Faculty of the University of Berlin, 
consisting of a body of professors of Classics, History, 
Natural Science, and all branches of JVissenscJuift, a 
body without superior in the world for eminence and 
distinction, reported, and reported tmaniriKmslyy that 
" the preparatory education which is acquired in the 
Bealschulen of the first rank is, taken altogether, 
inferior to that guaranteed by the diploma of a 
gymnasium," ^ 

The faculty stated as the advantages of a classical 
foundation for education the following : — 

1. In some branches of study (such as natural 

history) ignorance of Latin and Greek is a 
direct impediment. 

2. The ideality of the scientific sense is best 

cultivated by studies not directly in relation 
with daily life. 

3. Thus is also promoted an interest in knowledge 

for its own sake. 
4 In classical study the power of thinking receives 

a varied and general exercise. 
5. Such study has historic value, as illustrating the 

foundations of modem life and thought. 

Dr Hofmann, professor of chemistry, in an address 
given at the time, added that, " All efforts to find a 

^ See Conrad, The Oerman Universities for the last Fifty Tears (trans- 
lated), Appendix. 



68 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

substitute for the classical languages, whether in 
mathematics, in modem languages, or in the natura. 
sciences, have hitherto proved unsuccessful." 

In some branches of science, the Berlm professors 
say, the youths coming from the Realschulen have a 
better start, because they have had some previous 
practice in them, and know many useful facta But 
before long the youths from the Gymnasia overtake 
them, win the prizes, and by the end of their course 
have not only a better and wider general culture, but 
even a better mastery of the particular science they 
have been studying. 

After this, the setting forth of other evidence seems 
quite unnecessary. Of course the contest between the 
Classics and their substitutes in education still goes 
on vigorously in Germany. But as yet the position of 
the Classics in what is generally allowed to be the most 
efficient education in the world is well maintained. 
Thus those many authorities who are calling on us to 
make our education more practically efficient, and are 
holding up before us the competition of Germany, have 
no right whatever to ask us to give up the classical 
foundation of education. 

In America also, in a realm of boundless competi- 
tion, and immense trust in what is new, the Classics 
thoroughly hold their own in the school and under- 
graduate courses. When, a few years ago, I visited 
some of the inland universities of America, I was fully 
prepared to find classical study a struggling cause. 
How should societies cut off from tradition, and 
mainly bent on training men for success in the 
struggle with nature and for commercial life, retain 



DEFENCE OF THE CLASSICS 69 

the cult of the dead languages which in Europe is a 
continuous tradition? But these universities not 
only retaiD their grip of the Classics; but classical 
studies even gain ground, and inspire an enthusiasm 
greater than that inspired by most other branches of 
knowledge. 

I believe that at Oxford and Cambridge also there 
is among teachers a general belief that classically- 
trained men will usually prove superior to those trained 
in other schools, such as those of physical science and 
modem history, in almost all the struggles where men 
of different training compete together, even in cases in 
which the men trained in other courses than the 
classical seem to have a better start. Of course the 
competition is not so fairly conducted, nor its results 
so trustworthy as in America, since we are far more 
under the sway of tradition. All our great schools 
encourage the Classics, and the great majority of the 
abler boys are urged towards this particular kind of 
training by almost irresistible forces of custom and 
influence. But if the superiority of the results of 
classical training is fact, and not merely opinion, then 
the matter would seem to be decided by the only test 
from which there is no appeal, the test of fruita At 
any rate it would be folly to abandon the classical basis 
of education until some effective substitute for it is 
really found. 

There is another consideration which must not be 
omitted. The advocates of a modern basis to educa- 
tion in Germany wish to make German literature the 
main subject of study; those who in France take a 
similar line would accept French literature as the 



70 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

basal study. The countrymen of Shakespeare and 
Milton would naturally feel that to an English youth 
English literature is most important. In modern 
Europe, since the patriotism of the nations has pulled 
down the French language from the pinnacle which it 
occupied in the eighteenth century, there is no one 
language and no one literature which would be received 
throughout Europe as a common possession. Thus we 
are threatened with a terrible danger, that each nation 
will, on patriotic grounds, not merely promote with all 
its might the use of its own language, but even try to 
produce a civilization of its own, not resting, like all 
existing civilization, on a more or less Hellenic basis, 
but based on national history and full of the feeling of 
race. 

This possibility, which is anything but remote, is a 
serious matter for consideration. Every scholar and 
savant must sometimes regret that Latin is no longer 
the language in which works which appeal to the 
highly educated are written, and that as a result many 
books of very great value are buried alive because 
written in Danish or Magyar or Bohemian, or some 
other obscure tongue. But if it is impossible to 
re-introduce Latin as a language common to the 
learned of all nations, we can at least try to guard 
against the serious evil of dividing up, on prin- 
ciples of race and language, the common basis of 
European education. This would be undoing the 
work of the Christian Church in the Middle Ages, 
and taking a long step in the direction of a new 
barbarism, which would defend itself on the ground 
of patriotism. 



DEFENCE OF THE CLASSICS 71 

11. 

So far I have been occupied with the defence of 
the classical basis of education in our schools, and 
among younger students in our universities. But 
this defence must remain a very poor one unless we 
can justify classical study not only as a basis of 
general education, but also as in itself one of the 
highest and most important kinds of education. If 
the Classics are to drop away from the student, like 
his tail from the tadpole, as soon as full maturity has 
come, then we cannot expect long to retain them even 
in our schools. 

The strong hold which the Classics still retain upon 
education, in England, on the Continent, in America, 
is partly based upon grounds which will scarcely 
resist a severe criticism. In a large degree it is 
matter of tradition, of the inertia which makes 
teachers anxious to bring up pupils in the way in 
which they themselves were educated. Even the 
class-instinct, the notion that a gentleman ought to 
know or to have known something of Latin and 
Greek, may have some force. And besides this,, 
there is the conviction of the majority of secondary 
teachers that the study of the Classics pays, that it 
makes the mind alert and supple, ready to deal with 
books and men, able to express itself in words with 
ease and with elegance. 

But tradition in so unsettled an age is but a reed 
to lean on. And the test of fruits, though the most 
legitimate of all tests, needs to be fortified by some 
armour of reason and theory. If it is not made 



72 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

explicable to the intelligence, its mere working in 
practice is a precarious thing ; rationalism is likely to 
drive it out of field after field. It is therefore most 
desirable, if possible, to find some justification of 
classical training in theory as well as in practice. 
And in order to find it, we must go deeper into the 
whole question of education, and even the question 
of intellectual tendency in the modem world. 

When, at the time of the Benascence, Greek letters 
and Greek art were re-discovered, it seemed to the 
cultivated men of the time as if Europe were passing 
out of darkness into light, casting aside the barbarism 
and superstition of the dark ages, and basking in a 
new day of truth and of beauty. That, under the 
circumstances, the educated should blacken the shadows 
and heighten the lights is most natural. It seemed 
to them that the Ancients were superior in all respects 
to the Moderns, and that nothing was to be done but 
to follow the footsteps of the great writers and the 
great artists of antiquity, whithersoever they might 
lead. Even the most precious results of the religious 
experience of ages of Christianity were in danger of 
being thrown aside as worthless, and even Popes were 
anxious to be thought of as followers of the Greeks 
rather than as followers of Christ. 

If we allow for the natural exaggerations and the 
fresh enthusiasms of the time, we must confess that 
in general the great scholars of the Eenascence were 
fully justified in their anticipations. From their time 
to ours successive generations have found in the 
Classics ever new revelations of thought and beauty. 
If one thinks of the greatest names during the last 



DEFENCE OF THE CLASSICS 73 

four centuries, and then tries to imagine what they 
would have been without the light reflected from 
Hellas, one begins to realize how intensely Hellenic 
is the whole of the brighter side of modem civilization. 

It was not until the second half of the nineteenth 
century that the predominance of the Classics in 
education was seriously threatened. Of the attack 
upon it from the partizans of the immediately ex- 
pedient, I have already spoken. But we have now 
to consider a far more serious questioning of the 
classical tradition which comes from those who are 
not merely abreast of all the knowledge of the age, 
but even are looking earnestly into the future, and 
trying to observe the obscure tendencies of modem 
life and thought. 

The main prop upon which the new attack is 
based is the belief that in the education of the 
past, rhetorical and metaphysical tendencies have too 
much prevailed, and that the education of the future 
must be more and more scientific, scientific not 
merely in the sense of being more methodical and 
orderly, but in the sense of lying closer to fact and 
to reality. 

A more superficial school would on such grounds 
make a training in the knowledge of nature the basis 
of modem education. A less superficial school under- 
stands that man cannot, without deliberate suicide, 
put the study of his own nature and his own works 
on a lower level than that of mere surrounding things, 
but proposes to introduce into these human studies 
more rigid methods, imitated in some degree from 
those in use in the natural sciences. 



74 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

And since the great difference between ancient and 
modem civilization lies before all things in the greater 
value attached in modem times to fact as opposed to 
theory, and to experience as opposed to fancy, it is 
very natural that advanced educational thinkers should 
look with some distrast on the study of the Classics. 
They see that study to be largely dominated by fancy 
and by rhetoric, and they are less ready to see that it 
is possible to alter its character. 

This objection to the modem study of Greek has 
been formulated and replied to by one of the most 
brilliant of modem scholars. Professor von Wilamowitz 
Moellendorff.^ "Greek is not merely a language, in 
which certain Heroes in the far beautiful Spring of the 
world sang and spoke with inimitable expression* 
Looked at thus, old Hellas itself becomes a mere fairy- 
land, the citadel of Athens almost as much as the island 
of the Phseacians, and Greek history becomes an epic, 
the Persian wars as well as that of Ilion. All this is 
an artificial, a false light : our sons have a right to hear 
the truth. In the end, truth must be worth more than 
any beautiful illusion, for illusion is the work of men, 
truth is of God." 

But the writer of these words thinks that if the 
method of the study of the Classics be altered, they 
may well retain their place in education. Without 
allowing all the views of this great scholar, I am quite 
ready to go with him some distance. I hold, as he 
does, that unless some allowance is made for the 
modem spirit, unless the study of antiquity is pursued 
in a more historic spirit, and directed more to things 

^ OrieeMsehes Lesebueh, Prefiikoe, p. iv. 



DEFENCE OF THE CLASSICS 75 

and less to words, it must necessarily fade away by 



In order more fully to explain this view, and to 
show on what it rests, it is necessary that I should 
consider in some detail, though at small length in com- 
parison with its importance, the subject of the human 
sciences generally, and the changes in the current view 
of them which are coming over the modem world. 



CHAPTER V 

HUMAN SCIENGS 

The coarse in Humanity at Oxford needs not only 
to be widened and deepened, but it also, as I think, 
requires to be penetrated by a new spirit. Eeal 
progress can only take place when an ideal is accepted, 
either consciously or unconsciously, as a point to be 
approached by degrees. 

When a writer thinks himself called upon to assert 
ideals, he must cast behind him the fear of criticism 
and the beaten paths of caution. I shall therefore 
venture, in the present section, to express my views 
with considerable freedom, appealing as a searcher and 
a teacher to searchers and teachers. Where my views 
are mistaken or exa^erated, no doubt colleagues will 
be willing to set me right. When I come to speak 
of practical measures I shall return to more guarded 
views, and I am not without hope that some who 
only go part of the way with me in the search for a 
goal, may yet be willing to approve my suggestions 
as to the path which lies immediately before us. 

76 



HUMAN SCIENCE 77 



It has scarcely yet dawned on the workers of 
humanism in England that their studies are part of a 
great whole ; that they also need to be organized ; 
that to them also research and progress is as the 
breath of life. Humanistic teachers, like the Cyclopes 
of Homer, " dwell in hollow caves on the crests of the 
high hills, and each one utters the law to his children 
and his wives, and they reck not one of another." 
We have British Association meetings, archaeological 
congresses, educational congresses, congresses of all 
sorts. But we never have a congress of students of 
the Humanities, met together to consider how research 
in the subjects to which they are devoted may be 
developed and organized. This applies in some degree 
to all Europe and America, but especially to our own 
country. 

Matthew Arnold wrote in 1868^: "The idea of 
science £ind systematic knowledge is wanting to our 
whole instruction alike, and not only to that of our 
business class. While this idea is getting more and 
more power upon the Continent, we in England, having 
done marvels by the rule of thumb, are still inclined 
to disbelieve in the paramount importance, in whatever 
department, of any other." " In nothing do England 
and the Continent at the present time more strikingly 
differ than in the prominence which is now given to 
the idea of science there, and the neglect in which 
this idea still lies here, a neglect so great that we 
hardly even know the use of the word science in the 

^ Schools mid Unimrsitiea offht Continent, 



78 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

strict sense, and only employ it in a secondary and 
incorrect sense." 

Thirty years have passed since the Apostle of 
Culture, fresh from his study of German schools and 
universities, wrote these words. But it must be 
confessed that things with us have not greatly changed. 
We still use the word science in a secondary and 
incorrect sense as applying only to the world of nature, 
not to that of humanity. We still fail to realize 
that all branches of knowledge are branches of 
a single tree, fed by the same soil and stretching 
upwards towards the same sky. We still fail to 
recognize that man in society and man in history 
may be the object of researches as methodical, as 
far-reaching, and as fruitful as are those in the field 
of chemistry or of biology, while their bearing upon 
practical life must be in the long run far more close 
and extensive. 

Yet in the greatest of our scientific institutions, the 
unity of all knowledge and its natural division into 
two great branches are fully recognised. The British 
Museum has to do with knowledge as a whola But 
the great collections which illustrate and aid the 
knowledge of nature are concentrated in the Kensing- 
ton branch of the museum, while the collections which 
belong to history, to anthropology, art, and literature, 
remain at Bloomsbury. In dividing the accumulated 
treasures of the nation between the two branches there 
was scarcely any difficulty, and the arrangement and 
classification of those treasures is, or should be, as 
methodic and scientific in the one place as in the 
other. Quite recently a charter has been granted to 



HUMAN SCIENCE 79 

an Academy which is intended to stand in the same 
relation to the sciences which have man, which have 
human history and works, for their subject, as the 
Royal Society stands in to the physical and biologic 
sciences. In all the great academies of the Continent 
a human section has long existed beside the section 
of natural science, and England has thus somewhat 
tardily followed the example. 

It may be well to set forth in few words what I 
mean by human science. It includes three main 
branches, the psychologic, the sociologic, and the 
historic. Under the first head comes the methodic 
study of man as an individual, his body, his mind, and 
his spirit. Under the second head comes the obser- 
vational study of man in society in all his aspects and 
activities. Under the third head comes the study of 
the past as interpreted by observation of the present, 
and as derived from aU records^ monumental, tradi- 
tional, written and printed. At the basis of history 
come anthropology and prehistoric archaeology ; next 
above these, the history of the great peoples of the East, 
Babylonians, Assyrians, Indians, Chinese. Next comes 
the classic world in its three great divisions, Greek, 
Jewish, and Boman; and so we pass to the Middle 
Ages, the Renascence, and modem Europe. The idea 
which binds together all this mass of knowledge is the 
idea of evolution. It is ultimately one ; and no part 
of it ought to be ignored by a great university, though 
of course some parts will attract far more attention, 
and be more useful to the ordinary student, than 
others. 

The blame for the non-recognition among us of the 



8o OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

essentially scientific character of the study of man 
must be divided. Our great philologists, archaeologists, . 
and historians have not chosen to insist on the fact 
that their work, so far as it has been ordered and 
methodical, is scientific. The unfortunate notion 
which has prevailed that science is the enemy of 
religion and of idealism may have made them by no 
means anxious to be called by its name. And the 
physicists and chemists and biologists have been led by 
the superior exactness of their methods and the definite- 
ness of their results to refuse the name scientific to ; 
historic studies, which is much as if the photographer ' 
were to assert that the painter is not an artist because . 
he produces a less precise copy of nature than himself. • 
Anthropology, which stands in the same relation to 
historic studies as does mathematics to physical studies, 
has struggled hard to separate itself from its natural 
congeners and to ally itself with biology and kindred 
studies; and the British Association has encouraged 
these illogical aspirations. 

But this confusion of thought has not, of course, 
been universal. Matthew Arnold, as we have seen, 
protested against it. And Huxley, with his noble 
perspicacity, wrote ^ : " The inquiry into the truth or 
falsehood of a matter of history is just as much a 
question of pure science as the inquiry into the truth 
or falsehood of a matter of geology, and the value of 
evidence in the two cases must be tested in the same 
way." This, however, is going somewhat too far. No 
human being can look on the facts of history in the 
perfectly calm and unemotional manner in which the 
^ lAft wnd Letters, ii. p. 212. 



HUMAN SCIENCE 8i 

geologist can examine strata and rocks. Freedom from 
bias, impartiality, is the standard which the historian 
strives to reach so far as he can ; but he cannot attain 
to it by a mere volition ; it has to be approached through 
infinite pains and most careful self-culture. If, how- 
ever, one omits in Huxley's statement the word pure 
as applied to science, it will be roughly correct. The 
canons of evidence are fundamentally the same in 
biology, in chemistry, in history, in the law courts; 
only in biology one can examine organs and tissues 
again and again, in chemistry one can make fresh 
combinations by way of experiment, whereas when one 
deals with human beings one has to make allowances, 
to eliminate bias, to discount authorities, and so one 
can seldom arrive at a result which is more than 
probable. History is not pure science, it is not exact 
science, but it is science, nevertheless. For science can 
be nothing but ordered knowledge, and whenever truth 
is sought by the method appropriate to the case, a 
scientific investigation is in progress, even if the 
results be indefinite. 

Yet small as is the vogue of human science in 
England at present, it is a safe prophecy that before 
the century which has dawned on us reaches its 
meridian we shall learn to realize how great is its 
meaning for the future of mankind. Some memorable 
words of Eenan may be quoted in this connexion: 
" The historic sciences especially seem to me destined 
to take the place of the philosophy of the schools in 
the solution of the problems which in our days most 
deeply interest mankind. Without at all refusing to 
man the power of passing by intuition beyond the 

6 



82 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

limits of the knowledge of experience, we may, I think, 
recognize that there are for ns but two kinds of science, 
the science of nature and the science of man; all 
beyond this may be felt, perceived, revealed, but 
cannot be tested. The greatest problem of this age 
is neither God nor nature, but man. And the real 
knowlec^ of humanity lies in historic and philologic 
science. The old psychology which dealt with the 
individual as isolated had a task which was doubtless 
useful and led to solid results ; but our age has rightly 
seen that beyond the individual there is the species, 
which has its history, its laws, its science. . . . 
History, I mean the history of the human spirit, is 
in this sense the true philosophy of our time. Every 
question of our age necessarily ends in historic dis- 
cussion, every statement of principles becomes a 
historic account. The position of each of us is 
determined by historic views." ^ 

That such is the intellectual tendency of our time 
is written large in many books for all who will to 
read. But it is never sufficient in addressing an 
English audience to speak only of intellectual drift 
and tendency. One has also to take up the matter 
from the ethical point of view. This is a fact which 
is no cause for regret, but rather for satisfaction. As 
Mr William James has well put it^: "The Con- 
tinental schools of philosophy have too often over^ 
looked the fact that man's thinking is organically 
connected with his conduct It seems to me to be 
the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to 

^ JEssais de Morale et de OriUquCj p. 82. 
^ Varieties ofBeUgious Es^perienee^ p. 442. 



HUMAN SCIENCE 83 

have kept the organic connexion in view. The 
guiding principle of British philosophy has, in fact, 
I been that every difference must make a diflference, 

every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a 
practical diflference, and that the best method of 
discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining 
what practical diflference would result, from one alter- 
native or the other being true." 

Writing then as an Englishman, I feel the necessity 
of considering the change in the intellectual horizon in 
an ethical as well as in a merely speculative aspect. 
It cannot be denied that with a scientific change of 
view will go a change of moral views. The whole 
matter is one too great and too diflQcult to be here dealt 
with at all fully. 

But I must briefly state my opinion. Morality is 
in the main a question of will, of conduct, of character. 
These are, of course, not unconnected with education, 
especially if the word education is used in a broad 
sense to cover the whole experience of life. But they 
do not in any great degree depend upon mere intel- 
lectual training. Two youths may pass through 
precisely the same course of training in knowledge; 
and one may use his knowledge for the best and 
highest purposes, the other for purposes which are base 
and mean. The training of will and character are not 
things of which I can here speak. They would not be 
primarily and immediately aflfected by a change of 
method in learning, though in the long run such 
change might react upon them. But decided changes 
in subject and method of study would have a great and 
immediate effect upon the intellectual side of human 



84 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

nature, would greatly alter the relation of the mind to 
the world of nature and the human world, and thus 
in the long rim greatly modify the face of society. In 
such modifications there must always be loss as well as 
gain. But I think we may clearly see that in some 
respects the introduction of more scientific method into 
human studies, a closer adherence in them to fact and 
reality, will bring not only intellectual but also ethical 
gain. I shall try to establish three statements, which 
are to me settled beliefs. 

I believe that nothing is healthier, more purifying 
and stimulating to the mind than a long conteu^t with 
fact and reality as opposed to mere words and theories. 
I believe that in our days the way of human science 
is the only sure refuge from scepticism, rationalism and 
nihilism in religion, in art, in politics, and in social 
studies. And I believe that the nation which is most 
devoted to human science must needs, among the new 
conditions of the new age, most prosper and flourish : 
the future of the world belongs to the people who 
have most knowledge of fact, most reverence for 
fact, most determination to make their conduct con- 
form to the realities of the visible and the spiritual 
world. 

In these days of little faith, so long a creed may 
seem to savour of superstition; but I hope to show 
that the superstition is shared by men of eminence 
and ability in the worlds both of thoughts and of deeds. 
I will speak in order of the three points which I have 
mentioned, and first of the delight and profit which 
comes to the individual from contact with things as 
they are. 



HUMAN SCIENCE * 85 



II. 



Very naturally, and indeed inevitably, the sciences 
which deal with nature arrived more quickly than 
those which deal with man at what may be called 
self-consciousness, at a perception of their higher 
functions in the history of the human spirit. All 
these are a fruit of the worship of truth. Among the 
Teutonic nations especially the worship of truth has 
tended more and more to become the basis of morality. 
We may see this clearly enough in the elementary 
matter of personal truthfulness. An English mother 
would forgive in her son almost any fault sooner than 
that of lying, and the word liar is one of those which 
rouse the blood of the gentlest amongst us. But it is 
a fact of observation, curious as it may seem, that 
the passion for personal truthfulness only in some 
degree and by slow stages enters into our intellectual 
life. Those who are perfectly truthful in intent are 
continually saying what is untrue through the mere 
want of intelligence to discriminate between what is 
and what is not. In judging of evidence, many of 
those who are otherwise intelligent are like children. 
In a work on the methods of history,^ two professors 
of the Sorbonne point out with remarkable clearness 
how natural it is to believe the testimony of anyone 
whom we have no reason to believe a deceiver, and 
yet how necessary it is that this instinct, like all the 
primary instincts of our nature, must be tamed, and 
made, so to speak, to run in harness, before we can 

^ Langlois et Seignobos, I'nJt/rodAJi^iQni atMn itudes HistoriqueSt 
p. 130. 



86 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

attain to any conception of historic method. Man's 
first instinct is to believe what he is told, just as his 
first instinct is to give a penny to every shoeless 
beggar ; but he finds by degrees that this road leads in 
the latter case to general pauperism and imposture, in 
the former case to utterly false views of the world and 
mankind. It is, of course, the crudest possible view to 
suppose that in order to speak truth one has only to 
wish to do so. Apart from some sort of methodical 
training, it is quite impossible to speak the truth 
even in matters which seem simple, and the power of 
discerning between fact and untruth is one which 
gradually grows through a lifetime devoted to the 
attainment of truth. Besides a virtuous will, and 
besides a methodic training, there are also necessary 
to truth-telling very important moral characteristics 
which are by no means of easy acquirement, which 
require as much toil for their attainment as any of 
the saintly virtues of the mediaeval church. 

Two passages on this subject from the letters of 
Huxley, one of the greatest of the prophets of the 
actual, will rouse an echo in almost all hearts: 

" The very air we breathe should be charged with 
that enthusiasm for truth, that fanaticism of veracity, 
which is a greater possession than much learning, a 
nobler gift than the power of increasing knowledge; 
by so much greater and nobler than these as the moral 
nature of man is greater than the intellectual; for 
veracity is the heart of morality."^ 

" Science seems to me to teach in the highest and 
strongest manner the great truth which is embodied 
^ Life and Letters of T. H, Huxley^ i. p. 405. 



HUMAN SCIENCE 87 

in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the 
will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, 
be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, 
follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses 
nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only 
b^un to learn content and peace of mind since I have 
resolved at all risks to do this." ^ 

In these passages we catch the note, not merely of 
the high ethical value of contact with fact, but also of 
the personal satisfaction and happiness with which it 
surrounds the life of the worker. As an anaesthetic 
for the small troubles of life, as a solace in times of 
trouble, as a cure for weariness and disappointment, a 
plunge into the stream of the actual is of unrivalled 
efficacy. It is health-giving to mind and to body, and 
it produces a normal and sane way of looking at 
events, which prevents one from falling into morbid- 
ness and hypochondria. 

Another great authority in the scientific world 
wrote many years ago, in regard to first-hand work ^ : 
'* A man is thus made to feel, as he can be made by 
no other means, that there is something sacred in even 
the jots and tittles of natural laws ; he learns to put 
away from himself all personal pride, and steps across 
the threshold of nature with bare bead and bare feet ; 
and the love of truth becomes with him a passion. 
He passes beyond the common honesty of the world, 
and reaches forward towards that perfect sincerity 
which is the fruit of loug-continued watchfulness, self- 
denial, patience, and care." 

1 Life and Letters of T. E. Suxley, i. p. 219. 
' Qttart&rlff Seoiew, yol. ozziii. p. 472. 



88 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Such utterances show that, as the author of Naiwral 
Bdigion has shown, in the whole-hearted pursuit 
merely of natural facts a man maj find what may be 
called a kind of salvation, a deliverance from pettiness, 
from self-absorption, and from lying. "If we will 
look at things," writes Professor Seeley,^ ''and not 
merely at words, we shall soon see that the scientific 
man has a theology and a God — a most impressive 
theology, a most awful and glorious God. I say that 
man believes in a God who feels himself in the 
presence of a Power which is not himself and is 
immeasurably above himself, a Power in the contem- 
plation of which he is absorbed, in the knowledge of 
which he finds safety and happiness. And such now 
is Nature to the scientific man." Half a century ago 
the same truth had been seen by one who had a 
remarkable gift for anticipating the progress of thought 
"Modem science," wrote F. W. Robertson,^ "is eminently 
Christian, having exchanged the bold theorizing of 
ancient times for the patient, humble willingness to 
be taught by the facts of nature, and performing its 
wonders by an exact imitation of them, on the 
Christian principle." 

It is this principle, which Huxley calls scientific, 
Seeley religious, and Eobertson Christian, which our 
9jgB is called upon to introduce also into human studies 
in opposition to the dogmatic or rationalistic procedure 
of past days. 

Hitherto reverence for fact, appreciation of reality, 

^ Naiwral Meligion, p. 19. 

^ Sermons, i. p. 164. Robertson cites the text, *'What things 
soever the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. Y 



HUMAN SCIENCE 89 

has not been equally in vogue in all fields. As is 
quite natural, the simpler of the sciences escaped from 
Uie domination of authority and prepossession earlier 
than the more complex sciences, geometry earlier than 
astronomy, astronomy than chemistry, chemistry than 
biology. In the matters of sense and of outward 
observation, in regard to visible things and natural 
fact, science is now supreme. And in these realms it 
has borne fruit in richness and in abundance beyond 
the dreams of imagination. By conforming ourselves 
to nature, and by watching her processes with humble- 
ness and in a teachable spirit, we have attained over 
matter a mastery such as our ancestors never thought 
of. The wildest flights of their imagination fade 
before such everyday facts as wireless telegraphy and 
photography by the Kontgen rays. Every year brings 
some new conquest over space and over the forces of 
the world, until nothing seems too great or too 
ambitious to attempt in the way of making the powers 
of nature do our bidding. 

Yet amid all these outward and obvious triumphs, 
there is among our best men a sense of frustration and 
of hollowness. It is not clear how far mere material 
triumphs can promote or secure human well-being. 
Outer circumstances change, but human misery and 
discontent persist. Idealists talk of the bankruptcy 
of science in all the higher and nobler functions of 
man, and many of them turn back from an age of 
outward and visible success to comparatively ignorant 
ages in the search for beliefs, for hopes, for happiness. 
Now it seems clear that much of the disillusion and 
dissatisfaction which we find in the highest quarters 



90 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

arises from a want of clear insight. Physical science 
cannot fairly be called disappointing. In its own 
sphere it has brought us results beyond calculation 
and beyond imagination. It has given us all, and far 
more than all, than we could reasonably have expected 
from it. It is our mistake that we expected from it 
what it could not possibly give, that we overvalued the 
outward and the obvious, and thought too little of the 
inward and spiritual. Science has disappointed 
idealists because it has been partial and incomplete, 
because it has neglected human nature, history, the 
higher surroundings of the human spirit. 

Does it not then seem possible that if we devote to 
the more immaterial, the human side of life, the same 
attention and care which we have bestowed on its 
physical side, if here also we learn to set aside rhetoric 
and assumption, and to accept fact as sacred, there 
may be in reserve for our children conquests as wide 
as ours, but in a different and less material region ? 
I do not of course mean that the methods of natural 
science can be imported unchanged and unadapted into 
the human world. The methods of astronomy are not 
those of chemistry, nor are the methods of chemistry 
those of biology. But the spirit of science in 
astronomy, chemistry, and biology is the same. It is 
the scientific spirit, rather than the methods in use in 
the schools of experiment and observation, that we 
need to introduce into the higher range of studies. If 
this were done, we might hope in time to produce in 
the human world as great changes as have been pro- 
duced during the last century in the world of matter. 

The task is one of unmeasured length and infinite 



HUMAN SCIENCE 91 

difficulty. If we consider how undeveloped at present 
is anthropology, the simplest and most rudimentary of 
all the human sciences, we may judge how much there 
is to do. Some people speak as if observing facts and 
accurately reporting them were the easiest of things. 
But in fact it is only a highly-trained mind which can 
really see the simplest fact, only a master who can 
precisely describe the commonest phenomenon. This 
is the case as regards the observation of nature : but 
how much more as regards the observation of mankind. 
In human studies the facts are far more complicated, 
the chances of observation far rarer; and at every 
moment inherited bias and acquired tendency come in 
to distort the visioa The virtues which the votary of 
physical science acquires as he works — ^patience, self- 
suppression, infinite respect for fact — ^must be cultivated 
in a still higher degree by him who would really learn 
about mankind. From experiment he is almost shut 
out, and the instruments of precision which are of so 
ready avail in all physical studies help but little where 
mind and thought are concerned. Thus the growth of 
the human sciences must be exceedingly slow. And 
it may be that for a long while to come in any par- 
ticular field of human study the talent of individuals 
may raise them to a higher level than can be attained 
by a methodic plodding worker of ioferior capacity. 
But the difference remains that the cleverness of the 
individual dies with him, or, rather, becomes stereotyped 
at his death; while in every generation those who 
work by science and method can raise, if but slightly, 
the level from which their successors will take their 
start. The great charm of science is that in it one 



92 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

never goes back quite to the f onner level. Old theories 
may be revived ; but it is with a difference ; they must 
needs be modified to fit new observations. In a 
primeval forest the savage can move faster than the 
engineer ; but by degrees the engineer lays down his 
railway, and by its means a child can move faster 
than the swiftest son of nature. 

How little do we at present really know about 
man! Physicians have studied his body, and their 
art is continually at fault when they regard this 
body as independent of mind and of spirit ; they treat 
man as an animal when he is half a god. Psycholo- 
gists have studied his mind; and only of late have 
they begun to realize that the workings of the mind 
are but the expressions of an inner force and will, 
which is sometimes revealed in consciousness, but 
often is hidden far beneath its surface. Attempts at 
religious reform usually succeed only here and there, 
because a profound and systematic knowledge of the 
humsm spirit is wanting to their authora 

We have seen occasionally in history a city or a 
nation, like the French at the time of the Revolution, 
determined to start anew and to recast the whole 
scheme of society in accordance with certain principles 
or ideas. Such attempts have succeeded only in 
small part or for a moment, because the notions as to 
human nature which occupied the minds of the 
leaders were utterly insufficient, mere hasty guesses 
and prejudices in the place of reasoned knowledge. 
All around us we see the founders of charities through 
mere ignorance producing far greater evils than those 
which they would fain remove; we see politicians 



HUMAN SCIENCE 93 

through want of method giving a new lease of life to 
the very hostilities which they would fain bring to an 
end; we see social reformers in their eagerness to 
combat a particular evil destroying the chief props of 
society, and imagining that, so to speak, water can 
be made to run uphill. In most of these cases the 
spring, the purpose, was probably noble; the whole 
action took its rise in the perception of actual fact, 
and was perhaps carried out with magnanimity and 
self-deniaL If as much evil as good resulted, the 
cause has commonly been mere ignorance of the 
nature of man and of the history of society. 

But one must end with a qualification; It must 
not, of course, be fancied that the mere study and 
arrangement of facts, that ordered knowledge which 
is identical with science, will at once furnish us with 
purpose and ideal in our lives. Physical science has 
done nothing for us in this direction, could not, in 
fact, do anything. It has only given us new ways of 
accomplishing our purposes, whatever they may be. It 
has but enlarged the field in which idea and purpose 
and will may work. In the same way a methodic 
study of man and of history will not in itself serve to 
guide us for the future, but it will enable us to pursue 
such ends as seem to us good with intelligence and 
purpose; it will enable us to realize in the world 
more systematically and consistently the ideas which 
inspire mankind. 

Carlyle long ago pointed out how in politics also 
we confuse means and ends. We extend the 
franchise, and regard that extension as an end, 
whereas it is, of course, only a means towards enabling 



94 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the heart and purpose of the nation to express itself 
in Parliament. Some fashions of popular representa- 
tion may be better than others, but nothing can avail 
unless there be a national purpose and a national 
conscience to represent. " Life develops from within," 
The more freely it can develop the better; but the 
what is always of infinitely more importance than the 

III. 

In the second place, human science seems to be 
the only way by which the negations of modem 
scepticism may be met and overcome. There is a 
notion abroad among the educated people of England 
that scientific criticism is destructive. And destruc- 
tive in a sense it must be, since so large a part of 
the notions and beliefs with which it deals is the 
outcome of mistake. But scientific criticism differs 
wholly from rationalist criticism. The rationalist 
condemns the views which he criticizes because they 
seem to him absurd, and often is ready to put in 
their place other views which commend themselves 
to him personally, but which rest on no more solid 
foundation than those which he attacks. But science 
merely searches out in a spirit of impartiality the fact, 
and if fehe fact be not certainly discoverable, it defines 
the limits of the doubt, and tries to arrange alternative 
theories in the order of probability. It is thus far 
less reckless in its denials than is rationalism; it 
teaches us to sit down in humble patience before all 
series of phenomena, to be willing to observe and to 
wait, and never to declare impossible things for which 



HUMAN SCIENCE 95 

there is good evidence, nor to declaxe certain what lies 
open to doubt. 

It is perfectly clear that in our days everything 
will be called in question sooner or later. The 
alternatives are whether the criticism shall proceed 
in a reverent or a reckless, in a patient or an arrogant, 
in a scientific or a rationalist spirit. One of the 
ablest of modem historians writes as follows: 

" The way in which historian and philosopher alike 
have escaped nihilism is the way of criticism, by 
which we penetrate through mere shows to the reality 
of things and see them as they are. Thus we may 
overcome mere negative rationalism, that superficial 
method which strives to remove the objections arising 
from the absurdities of tradition by some subjective 
fancy, some theory of one's own contrivance, whereas 
the only true objective remedy lies in a knowledge 
of the conditions and surroundings of historic life at 
every period."^ 

A great fact which in these days we have to face, 
whether sorrowfully or hopefully, is the shrinking of 
authority in all the fields of knowledge. In the 
sciences which deal with nature, authority can now 
scarcely be said to exist. If an authority is quoted 
in a work of natural history, he is quoted merely as 
bearing witness to certain facts, and it is understood 
that every reader and every student has a perfect 
right, if he has opportunity, to test the facts or to 
call them in question. If the theory of a master in 
the science is quoted, it is quoted merely as theory, 
that is, as a convenient way of colligating and ex- 
^ £. Meyer, Forsehwngen mr alten Oesehiehte, ii 888. 



96 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

plaitung facts, to be accepted until a better way can 
be discovered. 

By degrees, in the sciences concerned with man and 
with his history, a movement similar to that which 
has occurred in the natural sciences is taking place. 
Here also " the individual withers and the race is more 
and more." Here also the worship of the fact is 
spreading, and theories of great men are taken merely 
for what they are worth. It will be readily allowed 
that this is the case in such observational branches of 
human study as ethnology and political economy. But 
it may be desirable briefly to set forth in what ways 
this tendency must affect such studies as philosophy 
and history. 

The psychological part of philosophy will be greatly 
developed. In those sections of psychology in which 
experiment can be made, we have a close parallel to 
the experimental study of the external world. As yet 
experimental psychology has not reached very far-reach- 
ing results, but the certainty and objectivity of these 
results makes them valuable. The psychology which 
is not experimental but observational will also naturally 
attract the more scientifically-minded of the students 
of mankind. And here, as I think, is opening out 
before us a vast field for future work. Since literature 
began, man has continually been making observations 
on himself. Some of these observations may have only 
personal value, but many go down deep into the 
roots of the common life of the race. But they are 
not scientific, because they are not methodical; they 
need collation, arrangement; and they require to be 
tested by the results of fresh observations. In some 



HUMAN SCIENCE 97 

departments of psychology this process has been of 
late effectively carried out. 

To gather a harvest of fact from biographies, from 
philosophic and doctrinal treatises, from works of travel 
and history, mnst be one of the chief tasks of psychology 
in our day. But he who would use a sickle in this 
field must have prepared himself for the task by a 
long and careful observation of the facts of psychology 
in the world about him. It is through experience 
that history must be interpreted. Human nature is in 
all historic ages the same in essentials, and the records 
of history and the testimony of travellers must be read 
in the light of a methodical, a scientific psychology. 

It is surprising how in the long run such a pro- 
ceeding will tend in the direction of moderation, of 
conservatism. It is impatient radicalism and rational- 
ism which are willing to fling away the convictions of 
ages, and to start the world anew. Science knows 
that the beliefs of the past could not have persisted 
unless they were based on fact, though very often the 
facts were misunderstood. This feature is very 
prominent in Mr James' book on the Varieties of 
Beligiotis JEacperience. Popular rationalism flung aside 
the wonders of healing wrought in the early church 
as impostures ; modem medicine shows that many of 
them can be repeated under like conditions to-day. 
Mr James , observes ^ that the custom of methodical 
meditation, almost neglected among reformed Chris- 
tians, has been re-introduced to our notice by the 
professed mind-curers of America. 

In fact, all the earlier part of Mr James' remark- 
^ FarieUes ofEeligioua Experience^ p. 406. 

7 



98 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

able book, in which the facts of religious experience 
are arranged and classified, is a good example to show 
how tenderly and piously a really scientific psychology 
will deal with all the j)henomena of the human spirit 
With utmost sympathy and respect Mr James records 
the testimony of such lights of religion as Saint 
Augustine and Saint Theresa, of Gteorge Fox and John 
Wesley, constantly insisting that experiences which 
tend to the raising of the level of life cannot be dis- 
missed as mere morbid phenomena, the result of over- 
wrought nerves or irregular bodily functions. 

But when in philosophy and in religion and in other 
such matters we pass beyond phenomena, beyond that 
which can be observed, studied, in a degree verified, 
we reach the realm of hypothesis. And it is here that 
the shrinking of authority has produced, the most 
complete change of view. In philosophy great leaders 
have formed schools of disciples who repeated and 
defended their views as the only rational explanation 
of the universe. In religion great systematic theo- 
logians have promulgated schemes of doctrine, which 
have been accepted by the various organized churches, 
and made a test of orthodoxy, and a matter of in- 
struction to the young. The status of the great 
systematizer is changed, and he no longer dominates 
the schools. We recognise that philosophic system, that 
religious doctrine is but theory, an explanation of life, 
but not life itself. Theory is useful, is, indeed, 
necessary for the colligation of fact, to make it 
intelligible, and to give it a settled place in the house 
of knowledge; but theory is always decaying and 
becoming outworn, needs to be restated to every 



HUMAN SCIENCE 99 

generation and in every fresh school of thought, just 
as walls of brick require occasional re-pointing. 
Philosophic system and doctrinal construction are in 
essence exactly parallel to the theories which have so 
important a function in the progress of physical science, 
but \duch are now known to be not the building but 
the scafifolding, not the fact but a way of regarding it 

In writing thus I do not at all ' mean to condemn 
the promulgation of systematic views by schools of 
philosophy or by churches, nor even the teaching 
of doctrine to children, " This is a matter requiring 
infinite consideration, which can in fact only be settled 
by the study of the minds of children and men. It 
may be observed that it is practically impossible to 
teach the facts of physical science, without at the same 
time teaching a certain amount of theory, whereby the 
facts are bound together. Probably the same principle 
will hold in philosophy and religion. It may very 
well be doubted whether it is possible to call attention 
to non-physical realities without using words which 
imply system and doctrine. It seems possible, by 
degrees, more and more to draw a line of distinction 
between what is more and what is less certain in 
religion as in other matters. But in the present state 
of our knowledge, it is wiser, when fact and theory 
are inextricably intermixed, to accept the whole rather 
than to run the risk of rejecting valuable realities by 
a too hasty criticism of some parts of the theories in 
which they are wrapped up. 

In all the sciences there is a historic as well as an 
observational element. The histoiy which belongs to 
geology is the most ancient of all, reaching back to 



loo OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

the time when the solar system was in a nebular 
condition. The books of that history are, however, 
facts of observation. So also are the history books of 
biology, the rocks and deposits in which the traces of 
the primitive life of plants and animals in the world 
are preserved. In regard to hmnanity also, there is 
what may be called a geologic history, the flints, the 
pottery, the weapods, and the burial customs of pre- 
historic man. But the great mass of the history with 
which human science is concerned is that written on 
tablets or stones, or in books handed down to us from 
past ages. If we do not regard the writers of the past 
with quite the same veneration as moved our ancestors, 
if we do not accept their writings in so simple and 
unsophisticated a spirit, we at least pay them the 
compliment of studying them with infinitely more care 
and in far closer detail than did our fathers. Professor 
Seeley used to say that in modern days the commentator 
had greatly fallen in honour. Yet there perhaps 
never was a time when there was more care and 
intelligence devoted to the work of the commentator. 

Here, as in all the other branches of knowledge, the 
essence of the modern spirit is to discern between fact 
and theory. The text of an ancient, or, indeed, of a 
modern writer, is the starting-point. And on its 
exact restitution we have to work with infinite 
patience, aided by a hundred methods unknown to 
former scholars, some of them, such as photography, 
the result of physical discovery. In the text of an 
ancient writer we have *th^ fact, but in its interpreta- 
tion we at once come upon theory. And the essence 
of modem criticism is that it is in character psycho- 



HUMAN SCIENCE loi 

logic. It takes its start from observed facts of huioan 
nature, and reaching out into the past, tries to 
determine the historic and psychical character of the 
writer, the purpose with which he wrote, the circum- 
stances under which he wrote, and the like. Only 
when this study is fully carried out can we begin to 
determine what is the value of his testimony, what 
actual facts we may accept on his authority, how far 
we may use him in reconstructing the past. 

That this process is in Germany still incomplete we 
may judge from the following statement of a high 
modern authority : " We do not yet possess a com- 
mentary on Thucydides such as is really needed, a 
historic commentary, in which philological treatment 
of the text is not the final purpose, but only a 
necessary preliminary. The most important task of 
such a commentary would be to make facts clear, to 
answer the question why Thucydides writes thus and 
no otherwise, why in a particular case he introduces 
a speech, and a speech of that particular character." ^ 

It is easy to see that such methods of working will 
cause a new and a far higher value to attach to 
archaeology, the science of the existing remains of 
older civilisations. For a decree engraved upon a 
stone, a coin issued by authority, the physical con- 
formation of a battle-field are facts in a strict sense 
of the word, facts almost pure from theoretic admix- 
ture. We cannot therefore be surprised that modem 
criticism, with its imperious demand for the actual, 
has made much of the results of archaeological research. 
Nor can we wonder that the methods of archaeology, 
^ £. Meyer, Forschwngm imr aXten Cfe8^ickU^ ii. 882. 



I02 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

which oloBely resemble those of the observational 
branches of natural science, have exercised a great 
influence, even beyond their own province, on the 
minds of historians. It has generally been allowed 
that archaaological tendency has been in a conservative 
direction as regards the early history of the Egyptians, 
the Jews, and the Greeks. Perhaps this general 
impression may go beyond the truth, for conservative 
historians have been not unnaturally disposed to make 
too much of isolated archaeologic fact, and to interpret 
it too conventionally. Time will remedy this mischief, 
and in the long run, after all is said, it will be found 
that archaeology, by setting up fixed points here and 
there, has tended greatly to hinder the excessive 
destructiveness of historic speculation, to restrain the 
fancies of a too uncontrolled rationalism in dealing 
with past times. The past must be judged in the 
light of the present, it is true, but not by the mere 
subjective fancies of the individual As Mr Lang has 
well put it, " Assuredly the Bible must be studied 
like any other collection of documents, linguistically, 
historically, and in the light of the comparative 
method. But one may protest against criticising the 
Bible, or Homer, by methods like those which prove 
Shakespeare to have been Bacon.'' ^ 

IV. 

My contention as to the thoroughly conservative 

character of human science is thus clearly established. 

And if there be any value in testimony, the third 

point which I have mentioned is equally clear : that 

^ A, Lang, Tha Making of lUligum, p. 814. 



HUMAN SCIENCE 103 

under modem conditions the nation which adopts 
and insists upon the application of scientific method 
in all matters, in the world of nature and of man, will 
have an enormous advantage over its competitors. 

In 1870 Eenan wrote ^ : " The victory of Germany 
was the victory of the man who is full of reverence, 
careful, attentive, methodical, over slapdash and hap- 
hazard/* To be full of reverence and method is to be 
full of the spirit of science. That spirit some of the 
peoples of the Continent are introducing, not only into 
physical investigations, but into social and historic 
studies, and into practical life. And there can be 
little doubt that the future will belong to the people 
who do this most completely. 

In England it is the great progress made in 
commercial matters and in manufacture by the 
Americans and Germans, as a result of better method, 
which has especially attracted the notice of our states- 
men and organizers. With one voice they recommend 
us to mend our ways. Mr Haldane writes : 

*' Our middle classes find their position threatened 
by a new commercial combination. They have been 
forced to realize that courage, energy, enterprise are 
in these modem days of little more avail against the 
weapons which science can put into the hands of our 
rivals in commerce than was the splendid fighting of 
the Dervishes against the shrapnel and the maxims 
at Omdurman."* 

But it is not a question only of military success, 
or of commercial progress, but of the whole organization 

* Dannesteter, Life of Renan^ p. 192. 

^ R. B. Haldane, Education and Ehnjpire^ p. 6. 



I04 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

of life and society. The empirical and haphazard 
methods of the past in legislation, in social organization, 
in the conduct of life, need a thorough revisal, and an 
adaptation to the changed circumstances of the times. 
A very high authority, writing thirty years ago in the 
Quarterly Bemew, maintained that in the case of 
natural science, it was not the immediate value of the 
results which made it a valuable means of education, 
but the inculcation of method. " The general qualities 
which promise success in any walk of life, and which 
may be grafted on any young mind, or at least largely 
developed in most, are precisely those which are not 
only the essential requisites of success in scientific 
research, but are also peculiarly nurtured and 
strengthened by scientific work."^ "You will not 
find," writes Mr John Morley,^ " your highest capacity 
in statesmanship, nor in practical science, nor in art, 
nor in any other field where that capacity is most 
urgently needed for the right service of life, unless 
there is a general and vehement spirit of search in the 
air." What is true in regard to natural science is true 
also of work in the human sciences ; in fact, far more 
true, seeing that they are far more closely related to 
conduct and happiness. The future belongs beyond a 
doubt to the people who learn with most patience 
and determination to search out the secrets of human 
nature, the laws whose working we cannot escape, and 
who then map out their course in accordance with 
those laws. To this supreme question of efl&ciency I 
shall return in the concluding chapter. 

^ Qtiarterly Beview^ vol. cxxiu. p. 471. 
2 lUmsseaUf L 151. 



CHAPTEE VI 

THE CLASSICS AND HUMAN SCIENCE 

We are now in a position to answer the question 
suggested at the end of Chapter IV., whether a 
thorough study of the civilization of the ancient world 
is really a good preparation for work and for life in 
the new century. 

It is likely that some of those who sjrmpathize with 
the views above set forth as to the future of human 
and historic studies will think them not altogether 
consistent with the desire to maintain a classical basis 
for the highest education. It must be allowed that 
the study of the classics, as at present pursued, is but 
a very imperfect preparation for a life devoted to 
historic science. Yet I believe that now, and for an 
indefinitely long time to come, the best basis of 
education wiU be classical, though doubtless more 
directly observational studies will claim more time and 
attention than they have received. In fact a reformed 
classical course may well stand in the same relation 
towards human science in which a narrower study of 
the classics has stood towards Humanity. 

105 



io6 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

We have to consider whether a more advanced 
study of classical literature, philosophy, and history, 
pursued on historic and psychologic lines is, in fact, a 
worthy part of a really scientific education. I hold it 
to be so, and for reasons not unlike those which 
justify the use of the classics in our schools, of which 
I have already spoken. No doubt such studies as 
modern history, modem philosophy, and modern 
economics have more directness and actuality than 
ancient studies. Some men will feel irresistibly drawn 
towards them. Tet for those who are not impatient, 
I think that even when the main business of the 
student's life is to be things modern, he will greatly 
profit by preliminary study of ancient parallels. When 
a young man takes up the examination of phenomena 
of our own or of recent periods, he is overwhelmed by 
the mass of authorities, and by the divergent teachings 
of leaders, many of whom are strongly influenced by 
political, social, or other leanings. It is very desirable, 
before steering one's ship into the open waters of the 
ocean, to practise her in some gulf or roadstead. 
Greece and Eome present us with simpler problems 
than those of the modem world ; the extent of material 
is limited, and most of it has been examined and re- 
examined by some of the greatest intellects of recent 
times, by men who may indeed have had pet theories 
and prejudices, but cannot have been under the 
dominical of perverting interests and passions. 
Classical languages, classical literature, classical art, 
oflfer the best of training simply because they are 
classical, raised above the arena of modern dispute and 
struggle for existence, showing in simple and noble 



THE CLASSICS AND HUMAN SCIENCE 107 

form the workings of the human spirit. In all Greek 
work in particular, whether poem or speech, history or 
sculpture, there is an evenness of development, a 
simplicity of motive, a beauty of outline, which cannot 
be found elsewhere. And Greek and Boman civilization 
presents for solution a series of problems admjrably 
adapted for developing method in observation and 
reasoning. It is quite possible that the modern world 
may grow too eager for results, too hasty and im- 
patient to spend in the future so much time as it 
has spent in the past over classical training ; but if so, 
the world will probably lose much which it is a great 
pity to lose. 

From the thoroughly historical point of view the 
civilization of the Greek and Soman world gains a 
greater importance as an object of study than it has 
had before. It appears that all human history is 
an evolution from one stage to another. Similar 
phenomena meet us at every stage. But when we 

1 look back through the ages, we see that the thousand 

years from b.c. 600 to a.d. 400 is of incomparable 

I interest to us. The civilization of the modem world 

has been of comparatively brief duration, and in no 

\ modem age, not even at the Eenascence, has man so 

well shown the full extent of his powers of thought and 
production. Probably we shall never know the reason 

, of the sudden outburst of a brilliant social, intellectual, 

' and artistic life which marks the beginning of that age, 

not only in Greece and the Greek Colonies, but in 
Palestine and Westem Asia. Hitherto the world had 

li moved slowly, though the Homeric poems and some 

of the prophets of Israel had struck a lofty note of 



io8 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

moral and spiritual life. But the level of civilization, 
as we now know, in the South-East of Europe, was 
lower in the seventh century b.o. than it had been 
some centuries earlier. But a sudden awakening 
came, and within about a century there arose, in 
Greece, lyric and dramatic poetry, philosophy, and 
the beginning of history and of sculpture ; in Pales- 
tine, an astonishing religious revival and the wonderful 
poems of the second Isaiah. It is certain that the 
educated people of Greece for some centuries after 
that time reached a level of intelligence and showed 
a productive force such as have marked no subsequent 
age. It was mainly the rediscovery of the remains 
of Greek literature and art which transformed the 
Europe of mediaeval barbarism into the Europe of 
the sixteenth century. And from the same deep 
wells came the thoughts and impulses which origin- 
ated the Reformation and the rise of physical 
science. A large part of what is best in modem 
literature, philosophy, and art comes directly from 
contact with the Greek spirit, and what is not thus 
directly derived has, in the course of its production, 
been in great measure influenced by Greece. Modern 
Christianity is not more directly connected with the 
Founder and his Disciples than is modem culture with 
the ancient civilization of Hellas. 

But if the culture of the ancient world is to be 
taken up as an introduction to that of modern times, 
it must be taken up as a whole. It is not satisfactory 
to make elegant selections from it to be taught to all, 
while all not included in our selections is neglected or 
despised. It is the growth of ideas from stage to 



THE CLASSICS AND HUMAN SCIENCE 109 

stage, the development of one phase out of another, 
which is the key to the great panorama of ancient 
culture ; and its great attraction is that we can look 
upon it, as we cannot hope to look on modem civiliza- 
tion, as a cosmos. 

Perhaps no living scholar has a better right to sum 
up the study of the Humanities than Professor von 
Wilamowitz Moellendorff. I will cite a paragraph 
from one of his addresses to the University of 
Gottingen^: "With Homer begins a development of 
civilization continuous and aware of its continuity, 
which occupies a wider and wider field, first all Hellas, 
then in Alexander's time the East, then in the Boman 
age the whole basin of the Mediterranean. With the 
fall of the Eoman Empire the unity and continuity of 
this civilization ceases. The Barbarians gain their 
freedom: Christianity, though it arose out of that 
civilization, rejected it. Because that civilization is a 
unity, in spite of all changes in life and intelligence, 
every one of its phenomena in its individuality can 
only be understood as an aspect of the whole, and 
every phenomenon, even the most trifling, offers some 
contribution to the study of the whole out of which it 
rose, in which it exists. Because the object is one, 
philology 3 is a unity. The particle ap and the 
entelecheia of Aristotle, the sacred caves of Apollo and 
the idol Besas, the ode of Sappho, and the preaching of 
Saint Thekla, the metres of Pindar and the counters of 
Pompeii, the rude drawings on Dipylon vases, and the 
Thermse of Caracalla, the functions of the magistrates 

^ Beden wnd Vortrage^ p. 104. 

^ The writer uses philology in the broad sense of humanism. 



no OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

of Abdera and the deeds of the divine Augustus, the 
conic sections of ApoUonius, and the astrology of 
Petosiiis : all these, all, belong to philology, for they 
belong to the object which philology would understand, 
and not one of them can be overlooked." 

No one scholar, it is true, at least in our country, 
can hope to know aU parts of so vast a field. He 
must be master in one part of the field, and a willing 
learner in other parts. But the University should be 
the higher unit in which the partial and incomplete 
studies of its members should be incorporated, so that 
one thinks for another and helps another, and from the 
combined knowledge of all comes real prepress. To 
allow the limits, not of individuals but of Oxford 
scholars en masse, to be set by the conveniences of 
examinations, and the iron rules of the Civil Service 
Commissioners, is to take a line wholly unworthy of a 
great University. 

In England the study of the Classics in higher 
schools and the universities has two enemies. The 
first is the short-sighted view, of which I have already 
spoken, that studies with a more direct bearing upon 
life are more useful than those which merely cultivate 
the intelligence. The second is the want of freshness 
and vitality which has come upon the study of the 
Classics, because they have been studied in too narrow 
and pedantic a spirit^ without literary and historic 
outlook. I well remember that my own undergraduate 
study of the Classics at Cambridge was for this reason 
utterly uninteresting and barren, a pursuit which 
never drew out my capacities or roused any enthusiasm. 
It is thus that to very many youths in our great 



THE CLASSICS AND HUMAN SCIENCE in 

schools and to many undergraduates during the 
Moderations course at Oxford the Classics are dead 
instead of being the living fruit of a great civilization. 
A really historic and comparative treatment of the 
great writers of Greece and Eome is comparatively 
rare. And even in the last two years of the Oxford 
course such a treatment is but partially attained, 
because of the artificial restrictions of that course, its 
rejection of archaeological aid, its dominance by con- 
ventional examinations. 

I hold it to be possible, without introducing any 
very serious changes into the existing course at Oxford, 
to make it at least more effective as a preliminary 
training for men who intend to enter a profession or to 
take up teaching as the work of their life, even if full 
regard be had to the great changes in oi^r intellectual 
outlook, and the increased respect of the modem world 
for fact. Thus we come to the question of practical 
measures of university reform. 



CHAPTEE VII 

SUGGESTED REFORMS 

In recent years, owing to the wave of conservative 
reaction which has been observable in all departments 
of public life, there has been no great talk of University 
Beform. Movements have been quietly going on, 
preparations for great changes ; but the changes have 
been held ofif. The study of physical science has 
made steady progress, and at Cambridge occupies an 
almost dominant position ; but at Oxford its develop- 
ment has been less free and powerful. What is called 
University Extension has spread to the great towns 
of England; and this movement has doubtless in 
some ways been valuable, but it is a merely external 
growth, like the examination of schools, without any 
relation to the intellectual life of the university. 
More attention has been paid to . cutting channels 
whereby university knowledge may flow through the 
country than to deepening the reservoirs whence 
those channels derive their supply. But as regards 
educational ideas and methods, there has been but 
little change in Oxford since the last University 



SUGGESTED REFORMS 113 

Commission. Various attempts have been made at 
reform ; but they have usually been half-hearted, and 
have dwindled away. 

It is very interesting to read the proposals and antici- 
pations set forth by university reformers such as Goldwin 
Smith, Mark Pattison, and Matthew Arnold about the 
time of the last University Commission. Some of the 
changes they advocated have come to pass ; some which 
are clearly desirable have been till now delayed ; some 
would now find but few advocates. Apart from the 
definite decisions of the Commissioners, there has been 
much drift, and little purposeful change. As might, 
under such circumstances, have been expected, changes 
which were in thp interests of individuals have been 
carried out ; those which tended to the general good 
only have been neglected. The marriage question has 
settled itself somehow ; tutors' houses have been erected 
at several colleges, restrictions of all kinds have dis- 
appeared ; but the machinery of the university remains 
as clumsy and ineffective as before ; and the noise of 
intellectual stir which fills the universities of Europe 
and America arouses but faint echoes here. 

Although the evils which necessarily attach to class 
and competitive examinations are obvious and very 
real, yet it would doubtless be futile to contemplate the 
entire abolition of such examinations. The teachers and 
the students alike have become so thoroughly accustomed 
to teaching and working in view of examinations, that 
if these were removed, the whole framework of Oxford 
study would collapse. As things stand, the only way 
of securing the methodical study of any branch of 
knowledge is to set up an honour examination in it. 

8 



114 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

Under the present conditions, if an undergraduate 
chose to content himself with a pass degree, or a third 
class in honours, and to give his whole strength to 
some subject to which his tastes and talents inclined 
him, he might probably make better use of his time 
than in any other way. But a course so manful and 
self-reliant is outside the dreams of the ordinary 
undergraduate, and could be carried through only by a 
very few in each generation, unless indeed one reckons 
the athletes in this class. Class examinations on the 
one hand and idleness on the other are the two 
alternatives between which the men usually decide. 
If their abilities are so good that they can combine 
these two alternatives, they are reckoned by many of 
their fellows supremely happy. 

It appears to me that it would be possible, without 
any violent change in the present course in litterse 
Humaniores, to make it on the whole as good as any 
course at present anywhere existing. The evils which 
adhere to it are removable, and the good of it is worth 
making some sacrifice to preserve. The mischief is 
want of discrimination between sorts of men, too rigid 
a system, too little allowance for individual bent and 
oharactiCr. 

If I tried in detail to set forth a reformed scheme 
of examination in the Humanities, I should be walking 
into a trap. The difficulties and the pitfalls awaiting 
any attempt at change are innumerable. No change 
at all can be made without infringing vested rights 
and without giving up present advantages in order to 
secure greater advantages. Any new scheme must be 
the result of discussion and of compromise, and must 



SUGGESTED REFORMS 115 

seem to a minority worse than nothing, and probably 
to a majority but little better than nothing. I shall 
only try to sketch in outline such changes as might 
commend themselves to those who regard the views 
already expressed in these pages as reasonable and 
just And it is obvious that some parts of the pro- 
posed scheme might be adopted, without necessitating 
its adoption in all points. 

The first change which I would suggest is the 
reduction of the length of^the Ho nours course, for 
ordinaryvjnen, from t our to th ree^yeafs. By the time 
that he has reached cwo-and-twenijy, a man ought to 
be free from the incubus of examinations,^ and ready 
either to take up his professional career, or to proceed 
to more detailed and advanced study as a preparation 
for teacJiing or research. 

Two courses of action would be possible. Either 
the twQ^ e xisting examin ations could bB^anjalgamated 
into one and placed at the end of three years, or the 
time for the first examinatioripModerations, could be 
shortened. To me the second of these two alterna- 
tives seems on the whole preferable, for, undergraduates 
being what they are, they could scarcely be induced 
to start seriously for an examination divided from 
them by a tract of three years. A first examination 
could well be set after a residence at Oxford of a year 

^ It is to be hoped tliat the custom of awarding Fellowships on 
examination, which has of late years been dying down, may speedily 
become extinct Few things conld be more demoralizing to a young 
graduate than the attempt to keep up " examination-form " after his 
degree. Such form is imperilled by studying abroad, even by advanced 
work at home. A man can only retain it by stunting himself, and 
remaining at the examination level. 



/ 



Ii6 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS, 

and a term, in December of the year following 
matriculation. 

All schemes of reform almost necessarily begin by 
an attack upon the present scheme of Classical Honour 
Moderations, which contents few. The subjects of 
Moderations are at present mostly such as a boy has 
studied already, composition, and translation of the 
Greek and Boman writers who are commonly read in 
the higher forms of schools. It is notorious that it is 
difficult to maintain the interest of undergraduates in 
work thus wanting in novelty. On this point I have 
already dwelt. 

It would be possible to substitute for the present 
Moderations an examination of a somewhat different 
character; its nature would naturally depend upon 
that of the Final Examinations, of which I shall 
presently treat. Without venturing to draw up a 
scheme for the first examination, I would suggest 
some features in it which seem essential 

1. It should be essentially and primarily a classical 
examination, devoted to testing the scholarship of the 
examinees, and their proficiency in the Greek and 
Latin languages and literature. 

2. It would be well to direct more attention than 
is at present directed to ascertaining whether they 
understood what they read. The subject matter of 
historians and philosophers as well as of poets and 
orators should be a subject of examination. It is 
necessary to an intelligent reading of classical writers 
that their works should be regarded in proper per- 
speotive, as writings of a particular period, standing 
in close relations to the life, the customs, and the art 



SUGGESTED REFORMS 117 

of that period. Thus there should be set papers on 
Greek and Boman history and antiquities, designed 
not to encourage the acquisition of masses of detailed 
information, but rather to secure in students a fresh 
and intelligent interest in their authors. 

3. It seems distinctly desirable, as already observed, 
to give men when they enter the university some 
subjects of an interesting kind which will be new to 
them. Two subjects seem specially adapted for this 
purpose, and might well be made alternatives — (a) the 
elements of logic and of moral philosophy, (fi) the 
elements of Greek art, especially sculpture. Either 
of these subjects would well serve the purpose of 
introducing the freshman to a larger world of study 
than that to which he was accustomed, and arousing a 
new intellectual interest. 

As the first examination would be taken by all 
classical students alike, there should be required in 
those who passed it all knowledge the absence of 
which would be a disgrace to a classically-educated 
man. After this examination students of different 
tendencies and tastes should be permitted to diverge. 
This is closely parallel to the line already taken in 
the examinations in natural science. 

At the end of the third jftar ff^^^^^i^ ^^ pinpari Uia 
final examination. Of the unsatisfactory nature of 
the present Final Schools I have already spoken. 
For many years past the vastness of the ground 
covered by the examination has been excessive ; and 
it is well known that few or no men can duly occupy 
the whole of that ground. Although alternatives 
have not formally been admitted, yet in practice they 



ii8 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

are to some extent allowed. The right and natural 
coarse would clearly be to sanction a custom which 
necessity has introduced, and openly to set before 
the student a choice of subjects. Three alternative 
courses suggest themselves, any one of which would be 
an excellent training, and one or other of which 
would smt almost any intelligence. These courses 
would 



1. Philosophy, ancient and modem. 

2. Ancient history and archaeology. 

3. Philology and criticism. 

On each of these I will briefly comment. 

1. It is practically impossible to divide ancient 
from modern philosophy. A classically-trained man, 
and especially an Oxford man, will naturally take his 
start from Plato and Aristotle. But he should not 
neglect the very important philosophic schools of later 
Greece, nor even Eoman Stoicism. In the comparison 
of the solutions of the problems of life and mind which 
are offered us by ancient writers with those which 
have successively prevailed in the modern world will 
lie an excellent training. But yet something is needed 
to give greater actuality, a closer touch with fact, 
and this may well be supplied by insisting in the 
examination on a grasp of the facts of observational 
psychology. An alternative to psychology might be 
modem economics. 

2. If ancient history were made the ipain subject 
of study for nearly two years, it would be possible to 
require, besides an intimate knowledge of the great 
historians, which would, of course, be primary, some 



SUGGESTED REFORMS 119 

careful examination of such sources of our knowledge 
of ancient history as are not literary. It would be 
possible to study the geography, the monuments of 
sculpture and architecture, the inscriptions and coins 
of the Greeks and Bomans, and to learn something of 
modern methods of historic enquiry and the criticism 
of authorities. After what has been already said 
on this subject, I need not stay here to show how 
actuality would thus be given to the study of the 
ancient world, and the minds of students trained for 
work in the modem world. A modem touch might 
be added in the comparative study of political 
institutions. 

3. Criticism and scholarship would naturally attract 
men of a literary turn. The importance of keeping 
up a high standard in scholarship is said on good 
authority to have been of late overlooked at Oxford. 
Of course in this branch of the final examination, the 
level of scholarship required for a first-class would be 
something respectable. But as scholarship and literary 
criticism encourage elegance rather than force of 
mind, it would be desirable to add under this head 
some studies calling for definite hard work. Com- 
parative philology might be studied at all events in 
an elementary way; and students might be trained 
to grapple with inscriptions and manuscripts. 

Each of the three courses above mentioned would 
be adapted to a different type of mind, the philosophic, 
the historic, and the literary. It is noteworthy that 
the Oxford Philological Society has quite spontaneously, 
and by the logic of events, divided itself into these 
three sections. In one or another of them almost 



I20 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

any man of intelligence would find scope and mental 
stimulus. And in each there would be provided 
some contact with actual fact, so that each could 
claim to be an introduction to some side of human 
science. And the present crush and hurry would 
be done away. The two years and a quarter now 
devoted to the course in Litterse Humaniores would 
in fact be not shortened by half a year, but in theory 
lengthened out to four years and a half, a reasonable 
time for so great a mass of subjects. As a rule, of 
course, men would only take one branch, pursuing the 
subjects to which their intelligence was adapted, and 
not being perplexed with those for which they were 
unfitted. I have indeed heard it argued that men 
derive most good from the studies to which they are 
naturally unsuited ; but I imagine that this is not the 
kind of opinion on which anyone would work in 
practical life. 

The degree of B.A. could be claimed by all who had 
taken a class in a branch of the Final Examination. 

There is, however, a very strong feeling among 
Oxford teachers that historic and philosophic studies, 
when combined, have a far better educational result 
than either separately. Under the course here out- 
lined, such advantages, whatever their value may be, 
need not be given up. An undergraduate might be 
allowed to take one branch of the Final Examination 
in one year and another in the next. In this way the 
whole course would still be comprised within four years, 
and any man could combine history with philosophy 
or with criticism, or philosophy with criticism, thus 
securing a training unquestionably more thorough and 



SUGGESTED REFORMS 121 

complete than he now gets in the same time. The 
memory also, which is at present overtaxed in the 
preparation for the schools, would be relieved if, in 
preparation for any examination, it had only one class 
of facts to deal with at once. 

It is clear that the course suggested, though it would 
not break the tradition of examinations, would greatly 
diminish their tyranny. Half the number of papers at 
present set to each candidate would be quite sufficient 
to test his knowledge, if he had to take one subject 
and not three. This would be a very great advantage. 
And as at Oxford fellowships do not depend on place 
in the Final Schools, it seems to me that alike tutors 
and imdergraduates might begin to breathe again. As 
to special subjects, it would almost seem that they 
might disappear from the examination and be taken up 
by the abler men as work for a fourth year. 

Perhaps by itself a change in the ordering of 
examinations might not avail to remedy the defects of 
the present course. But it would tend to counteract 
them. And it would probably be accompanied by 
other changes. It is certainly desirable that under- 
graduates should learn to depend less upon lectures and 
more upon books and facts, and if they were less 
pressed for time this might be brought about. It is 
desirable that they should learn to rely less upon 
their tutors and more upon themselves, and instead of 
constantly writing essays, should take up little pieces 
of work, to be carried out in their own way and by 
their own resources. The writing of an essay now 
and then probably tends greatly to help men to 
express themselves; but the continual writing of 



122 



OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 



essays, like too much of Greek and Latin composition, 
may prodace weariness and indifference. On the other 
hand, to find things out for oneself is the very essential 
of education ; what is thus acquired is remembered for 
life, and by such exercise the muscles of the mind 
grow strong and supple. It is in the direction of 
these changes that the course which I have sketched 
would work. 

An objection which is sure to be brought against 
these proposals, and which will carry weight in many 
quarters, is that they would require too much, too 
severe and special a training, for the ordinary under- 
graduate, the man who wants only what he would call 
a good general education. The final examination as 
it stands at present is regarded by many as too ^^eeial 
for the class of undergraduates of whom I speak, and 
some teachers would gladly bring it back to what it 
was thirty years ago. This I do not think to be 
possible ; but yet I am by no means without sympathy 
for the man who wants a more general education. 
It seems not impossible to make allowance for him 
without expelling the percentage of the world's progress 
in knowledge which has filtered through into the 
Oxford course. 

The fact is that Oxford class or honour examinations 
have become somevdiat perverted from their original 
purpose. They were meant for men who had some 
intellectual ambition, and more than average ability. 
But now it has become the custom to send through 
them men who are either without the will or without 
the capacity to do justice to them ; and the abler men 
in the University are kept at a lower level for the 



\ 



SUGGESTED REFORMS 123 

sake of such. It is desirable that the standard for 
honours should be very decidedly raised, and that Pass 
Examinations should be improved, so as to make them 
a really worthy course for ordinary men. The man 
who wants a general training, who does not want to 
go far, in classics or anything else, should clearly have 
arranged for him a general examination, a good all-round 
pass test, which should provide him with honest work 
during his residence, but not prevent him from follow- 
ing up any particular line of reading or investiga- 
tion which might happen to attract him. Whether the 
lowest standard in the Pass Examinations should be . 
raised, so as altogether to exclude incompetent men 
from the Oxford degree, is another question, which 
I do not propose here to consider. But, apart from 
this, a standard of a pass first class might easily be 
established, so as to make it by no means a con- 
temptible achievement. Many of the men who at 
present attain to a third class in Honours would do 
far better to read for a good Pass Examination. All 
this would do much to break the tyranny of examina- 
tions. 

The advantage of shortening the course in most 
cases by a year would be inestimable. Men who were 
going into business or into a profession could set about 
their special training at a more reasonable age. And 
those who had a real capacity for study could devote 
the year thus saved to graduate study, to doing for 
themselves some small piece of first-hand work in any 
part of their subject which they had found attractive. 
In the present state of the world no man can be 
considered really educated who has not thus set 



124 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

himself face to face with some group of facts to be 
grappled with, to be conquered and reduced to order. 
Under the Oxford system, a man after his final ex- 
amination is not fit for such a piece of special study ; 
he does not know how to set about it, or what it 
means; he has not learned the practical uses of 
scientific method. But according to the scheme here 
suggested, he would at the end of three years be 
prepared for this further and final training. 

But what is most necessary is that in all appoint- 
ments of a classical kind — ^in provincial colleges, to 
fellowships and tutorships at Oxford, even to the 
upper forms of schools — ^regard shall be had to the 
question whether candidates have really won their 
spurs by doing some good piece of work. That they 
have merely passed good examinations does not prove 
that they possess perseverance, method, respect for 
fact, or that they are fit to form younger minds for 
the conflict of life. Of course the candidate need not 
be a specialist ; that is quite another matter ; but he 
should prove that he is not a mere dilettante and 
sciolist. 

It must be allowed to be a merit of the scheme 
which I have sketched that although it would bring 
Oxford into the current of the world's studies, and out 
of the backwater of particularism, yet it would intro- 
duce no violent or dislocating change in our system. 
It would merely hasten the progress of a revolution 
which is actually taking place, though slowly and 
tentatively. Oxford would still preserve a very 
strongly marked special character in her classical 
course, which would strongly contrast with the free 



SUGGESTED REFORMS 125 

options of Gennany and America. Cambridge has 
recently entirely changed her classical course; as I 
think, very greatly for the better ; but her new course 
would still I think be decidedly inferior to that which 
I have ventured to propose. 



OHAPTEE VIII 

EFUCIKNCY. CONCLUSION 

The newspapers tell us that one demand — in commerce, 
in legislation, in the talk of the people — eclipses all 
others, the demand for efficiency. If we mean to 
hold our place among the nations, nay, if we would 
save ourselves from utter downfall, we must learn to 
be more efficient. And tlie particular nations in face 
of which we have to assert our efficiency are Germany 
and America. It is useless to conceal or to minimize 
the truth in such matters. In race, the Germans and 
Americana are nearly allied to us; in religion, in 
material conditions, in traditions they come closest to 
us. Naturally we have closer ties of friendship with 
them than with other peoples. But for all that they 
are our rivals, rivals in sea-power, in science, in 
commerce, and we must hold our own against them, 
or we must go to the wall. This international rivalry 
affects Oxford as a leading power in education. It is 
the business of Oxford so to train the students who 
come hither for training that they may hold their own 
everywhere, and keep up the honour of the flag and 
the influence of England in the world of intelligence 
and of knowledge. Mr Sadler has maintained in his 

is6 



EFFICIENCY. CONCLUSION 127 

remarkable work on education in Germany, that 
(rermany has stolen a march upon mb, and it will take 
us at least a quarter of a century to secure as efifective 
an education in England as now prevails in Germany. 
Mr Sadler's summary of the position of education 
among our continental rivals is admirable. 

** The German higher education spares no pains to 
make boys thmJe. But it was never intended to make; 
them think for the mere pleasure of thinking. It 
intends to make them thmk in order that they may 
act, act, that is, not on impulse, not merely with 
blind, dogged persistence, and not simply with splendid 
individual energy and courage, but with far-seeing 
calculation, with skilful and economical adjustment of 
well-chosen means to well-defined ends, and in com- 
bination with great numbers of other workers uniting 
their strength in the same task. The organization of 
modem life in Prussia has been dominated by scientific 
conceptions ; not, that is, by any exclusive regard for 
physical science in its narrower sense, but by those 
ideas of exact and co-operative inquiry and endeavour 
which have been so brilliantly illustrated, and there- 
fore so powerfully enforced, by the advance of modem 
science." ^ 

But lest the perusal of such a passagd as I have 
quoted should leave us in despair, I hasten to quote 
another, which proves that in the opinion of an 
authority of very great experience, not all the qualities 
which make for success flourish most vigorously in 
Germany. Mr Saunders testifies as follow^ : 

"I find that the intellectual apprehension of the 
^ IL Sadler, Education in Germamyt p. 84. 



128 OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

average educated German is at least, on a rough 
computation, ten times quicker than that of the 
average educated Englishman. On the other hand, in 
nine cases out of ten I find the former's intellectual 
judgment most uncertain and weak, and often most 
conventional In ordinary matters of judgment, it 
usually turns out that the Englishman has, perhaps 
unconsciously, been taking a much wider basis for his 
induction than the German has." ^ 

My own opinion, based upon a long experience of 
German books and writers, agrees completely with Mr 
Saunders'. In the amassing and the ordering of facts, 
the Germans have a faculty which we can only regard 
with envy. Btit when it comes to putting facts into 
due perspective, discerning what they do or do not 
prove, comparing the degrees of probability of various 
views, the English intelligence seems to me, when not 
perverted by strong bias or ignorance, superior to the 
German. And here is our opportunity. For, after all, 
this power of perspective is the rulhig faculty. The 
man who has it can, to a great degree, use the mere 
accumulator of facts as a hewer of wood and a drawer 
of water, to furnish him with the materials for intel- 
lectual' construction, or for paving a path in practical life. 
It is, however, quite indispensable that anyone who 
attempts to value and to use the researches of others 
should have been himself properly trained in the logic 
of investigation, and should have himself done some 
first-hand work. Thus alone does a man gain a secure 
standing, a manly self-reliance, without which he may 
drift, as so many teachers and students do drift, in 
^ Mr G. Saunders, quoted in Sadler, Education in (hrmany^ p. 52. 



EFFICIENCY. CONCLUSION 129 

one of two directions. Either he will accept a par- 
ticular master, and regard all his views as possessing 
a semi-sacred character. Or he will lose his way in 
the turmoil of controversy, and think that any one 
view is about as probable as any other, becoming, as 
Plato says, an opponent of reason, and taking refuge 
in an unlimited scepticism. 

And again, to come back to a point on which I have 
dwelt almost to weariness, there is no reason whatever 
why, if we make our studies more orderly and compre- 
hensive, we should thereby lose the moral and personal 
qualities, whatever they may be, which have hitherto 
enabled Englishmen to play in the world the great 
part which they have played. At present much of the 
energy and ability of the nation is wasted, simply 
through want of order and method. It is this waste 
for which one would fain suggest a remedy. If a 
thoroughly scientific education has not in Germany 
been a complete success, the reason does not lie in the 
kind of mental training but in other things, into which 
I do not feel called upon to enquire. 

At present in Oxford there is a tendency to level 
up in athletic sports, and to level down in studies. 
The athletic ideal is constantly rising; records are 
daily being broken ; the man who excels is placed on 
a pinnacle for the worship of his contemporaries; a 
football match excites more attention than a battle or 
a great literary achievement. But meanwhile the 
average man is neglected ; for him there is no regular 
or methodical training ; he is allowed to grow up with 
his physical defects uncorrected, he is not encouraged 
to attain such a degree of excellence as his indifferent 

9 



er"^=r 



ijo OXFORD AT THE CROSS ROADS 

phyaiqiie will allow. The manj are n^leefeed; the 
few are oyerestimated and oTostimiilated. 

In matteie of study precisely the opposite conise 
is taken. The nniTeisity is most diligent in examin- 
ing schools; in spreading the benefits of extension 
lecturing through the land, in trying to drag men of 
poor ability up to the point at which they may succeed 
in passing examinationa Bat meantime the few — I 
do not mean the merely clever men, but those who 
set themselves to do good work, the men who sustain 
the credit of Oxford in foreign lands — are neglected 
or merely tolerated. If they have abundant private 
resources, they can pursue their own course; but 
otherwise they are obliged to expend in work of 
routine the energies which might do great things in 
the service of knowledge ; they are set to cut billets 
with a razor, and the keenness and enei^ with which 
they set out is soon blunted, until they fall back into 
the ranks of the undistinguished. 

The main cause of this curious state of things is 
probably the exi^erated working of the educational 
ideas of Thomas Arnold and of K Thring,^ ideas good in 
themselves, but like all other good ideas liable to work 
mischief when carried too far. The English public 
school has its merits as well as its defects ; but that 
its spirit should dominate the universities is incon- 
gruous. We want more levelling up in study, and 
more levelling down in athletic sports; for whereas 

^ Fifty yean ago Thrinj; began to maintain that a boy who could not 
hold his own in study might retain his self-respect and command the 
respect of others on other lines. That was healthy. Kow Mr Benson 
telhi ns that intellect is un&shionable in public schools. That is 
unhealthy.